The Gatekeeper.(Rahm Emanuel)(Interview)

Rahm Emanuel's office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely arranged, each one parallel with the desk's edge. During a visit hours before Congress passed President Barack Obama's stimulus package, on Friday, February 13th, I absently jostled one of Emanuel's heavy wooden letter trays a few degrees off kilter. He glared at me disapprovingly. Next to his computer monitor is a smaller screen that looks like a handheld G.P.S. device and tells Emanuel where the President and senior White House officials are at all times. Over all, the office suggests the workspace of someone who, in a more psychologized realm than the West Wing of the White House and with a less exacting job than that of the President's chief of staff, might be cited for "control issues."

Because the atmosphere of crisis is now so thick at the White House, any moment of triumph has a fleeting half-life, but the impending passage of the seven-hundred-and-eighty-seven-billion-dollar stimulus bill provided, at least for an afternoon, a sense of satisfaction. As Emanuel spoke about the complications of the legislation, he was quick to credit colleagues for shepherding the bill to victory--Peter Orszag, the budget director; Phil Schiliro, the legislative-affairs director; Jason Furman, the deputy director of the National Economic Council––but, in fact, nearly everyone in official Washington acknowledges that, besides Obama himself, Emanuel had done the most to coax and bully the bill out of Congress and onto the President's desk for signing.

That afternoon, Emanuel and his team were already concentrating on the next major project: the President's budget, which will be released on February 26th. Emanuel had just come from a budget meeting in the Roosevelt Room with the President's senior staff. (The President was downstairs in the Situation Room; coincidentally or not, hours later U.S. Predators attacked a Pakistani Taliban compound in South Waziristan.) After the budget meeting broke up, staffers hurried through the West Wing reception area: Carol Browner, who is in charge of energy policy; Larry Summers, Obama's top economic adviser; Gene Sperling, an adviser to the Treasury Secretary; Orszag; Furman. Like Emanuel, all had worked in the Clinton Administration, all are strong-willed, and all know how to navigate the White House bureaucracy to advance their views. Emanuel personally recruited several of them, and it is now his job to manage their competing egos.

Hard copies of that morning's issue of Politico were strewn across desks in the West Wing; the paper depicted Emanuel on its front page as a lordly giant ruling over the White House, Congress, and the rest of Washington's political architecture. Not all the world's commentators, however, were as awestruck by his achievements. In Granma, the Cuban government's leading propaganda organ, Fidel Castro wrote of Emanuel, "Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands." After a rambling meditation on the similarities between the chief of staff and Immanuel Kant, the retired jefe concluded that "Obama, Emanuel and all of the brilliant politicians and economists who have come together would not suffice to solve the growing problems of U.S. capitalist society."

Emanuel, for his part, seemed indifferent both to the praise in Washington and to the oddball critique from Havana. In a few hours, he would be leaving for a ski trip with his family to Park City, Utah, and he was anxious to get out of the White House and start the weekend. Asked about Castro's article, he said, "Well, you know, ever since I stopped sending him my holiday card he's been ticked off. I don't know what to think about it. Do you know what I'm thinking about? I'm going to finally get to see my kids after a month. So that's all I give a fuck about."

Unlike recent chiefs of staff from the Bush and Clinton eras, who tended to be relatively quiet inside players, Emanuel is a former congressional leader, a Democratic Party power, and one of the more colorful Beltway celebrities. He is a political John McEnroe, known for both his mercurial temperament and his tactical brilliance. In the same conversation, he can be wonkish and thoughtful, blunt and profane. (When Emanuel was a teen-ager, he lost half of his right middle finger, after cutting it on a meat slicer--an accident, Obama once joked, that "rendered him practically mute.") And, like McEnroe, Emanuel seems to employ his volcanic moments for effect, intimidating opponents and referees alike but never quite losing himself in the midst of battle. "I've seen Rahm scream at a candidate for office one moment and then quickly send him a cheesecake," Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic representative from Maryland, and a friend of Emanuel's, told me.

Emanuel has long since learned to balance his outsized personality, which has made him a subject of intrigue in Washington, with a compulsion for order, which makes him an effective manager. As a child, he attended a Jewish day school in Chicago, where students received written evaluations, instead of A's and B's. "My first-grade teacher," he told me, "said two things that were very interesting: 'Rahm likes to clean up after cleanup time is over.' " He pointed to his desk. "I am fastidious about it. In fact, this is messy today." The second point was about Emanuel's "personality being larger than life." In the first grade.