A few weeks back, George Stephanopoulos, the longtime host of ABC’s This Week, explained to viewers how the 2024 election is unlike any other. “Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined by what’s happening in courtrooms than what’s happening on the campaign trail,” he said. “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But that is not what’s happening this election year.”
This strikingly blunt commentary on the state of American democracy was informed by Stephanopoulos’s two decades working in politics—on Capitol Hill, the campaign trail, and in Bill Clinton’s White House—as well as his two and a half decades as a political analyst and anchor at ABC News. “It is, to me, still mind-boggling that you can have a situation where a presidential candidate has been charged with inspiring an insurrection against the government and it seems like it’s absorbed into the daily grind of politics,” Stephanopoulos tells Vanity Fair.
For his new book, The Situation Room, Stephanopoulos breaks from the daily political churn to explore the history of a windowless White House facility that has been the setting for strategization about some of the most consequential national security decisions of the last 60-plus years—from the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the Kennedy administration, to the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden.
Stephanopoulos takes readers inside both the botched raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and the operation, under Barack Obama, that took down Osama bin Laden decades later. He also reveals what January 6 looked like through the eyes of Situation Room staffers—the subject of a Vanity Fair excerpt—and writes how “almost nothing” about Donald Trump’s presidency “was normal.” (Speaking of Trump, the former president filed a defamation suit in March against ABC News and Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s description of the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case; a network spokesperson declined to comment.)
In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Stephanopoulos talks about how conducting interviews for the book, written with Lisa Dickey, left him feeling inspired in a political climate that often doesn’t leave much room for optimism. “I would do my job in the morning, and in the afternoon, talk with these patriots who have served for the last 60 years,” he said. “It was a tonic for me.”
Vanity Fair: Why did you start out focusing on the Situation Room and kind of telling the last 60-plus years of US history through the prism of [it]?
George Stephanopoulos: I haven’t done a book since All Too Human, which came out in 1999, and I’ve actually turned down several book ideas, and started one book, and then realized that [I] couldn’t do it justice. I sort of had a test for myself. Could I bring something new to the subject? And would it be a book I would want to read? Somebody had mentioned to me the idea of writing about the Situation Room, and what struck me was—and what was most remarkable to me was—a popular history has never been written of the Situation Room. There was a book by a former Sit Room staffer named Michael Bohn that came out in the early 2000s, but that was almost 20 years ago now.