The White House: An Operating Manual

If you feel you won't have time to talk when you return a call, place the call before 9 a.m., or during the lunch period or after 6 p.m. Chances are good the caller will be out, but you will get credit for returning the call. Old friends are very sensitive to having their calls ignored; get 4-by-5 cards and dash off handwritten notes.

Read as many papers as you can before 8 a.m. As President Gerald R. Ford once said, "Start with the sports pages. Chances are 50-50 the news will be good."

Be careful of your personal appearance: your wardrobe, the ego wall with photos, your language, your personal demeanor. You are now in the White House, not on the Hill or in your den.

Outside the White House gates, watch your conversations at lunch and don't display your White House pass.

All those tourists who come and go and swarm the White House are paying your salary. Treat them accordingly.

Cabinet officers outrank you. Treat them with the respect they deserve.

Be accountable for every activity you undertake. An errant e-mail will find its way into millions of homes and blogs and the gossip columns. Follow the rules of the excellent little e-mail guide, "think before sending." The most secure way to communicate is with pen and paper -- and sometimes that doesn't work, either. Don't ever put anything down on paper that you don't want to see on the front page of The Washington Post.

Go home. At 7, 8 or 9 p.m. Forget it. The work will be there in the morning.

For your grandchildren, type up (not on the computer; it's subject to a subpoena and to mass distribution) a page of your activities for the day. Use an old-fashioned typewriter, if you can find one.

There are two things to remember on the ethics side. First, codes of ethics bind the ethical. Second, if it feels good, it is probably wrong.

The writer is a former U.S. ambassador to Belgium and now a strategic adviser at DLAPiper. He spent five years in the White House under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.