White House Chief of Staff
Sununu was the first White House Chief of Staff for George H. W. Bush, serving from 1989 to 1991.
Sununu is considered to have engineered Bush's mid-term abandonment of his 1988 campaign promise of "no new taxes".
Sununu is responsible for recommending David Souter to President George H. W. Bush for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, at the behest of New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman. The Wall Street Journal described the events leading up to the appointment of the "liberal jurist" in a 2000 editorial, saying Rudman in his "Yankee Republican liberalism" took "pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle ." Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had "suspected all along" that Souter would not "overturn activist liberal precedents." Sununu later said that he had "a lot of disappointment" about Souter's positions on the Court and would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia.
Time magazine dubbed Sununu "Bush's Bad Cop" on the front cover on May 21, 1990.
At the recommendation of George W. Bush, Sununu resigned his White House post on December 4, 1991.
Read more about this topic: John H. Sununu
Famous quotes containing the words chief of staff, white, house, chief and/or staff:
“I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“‘Tis this desire of bending all things to our own purposes which turns them into confusion and is the chief source of every error in our lives.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)