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 white house, white, house, chief and/or staff:
“During my administration the most unpleasant and perhaps most dramatic negotiations in which we participated were with the various leaders of Iran after the seizure of American hostages in November 1979. The Algerians were finally chosen as the only intermediaries who were considered trustworthy both by me and the Ayatollah Khomeini. After many aborted efforts, final success was achieved during my last few hours in the White House.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern men’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“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)