Gregory Korte

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The very first President's Intelligence Checklist — the predecessor to what's now known as the President's Daily Briefing — was delivered to President John F. Kennedy on a June Saturday in 1961. Typewritten on eight pages of 8.5-by-8-inch paper and stamped "For the President Only — Top Secret," it contained 14 two-sentence briefs culled from diplomatic, military, intelligence and press sources, six shorter notes, and maps of Laos and the Congo.

Today, President Obama receives the document on an iPad. The articles are somewhat longer and sometimes have dissenting opinions. The maps can be interactive, and the briefings can include video.

The differences aren't just technological. After serving 10 presidents — and now preparing to brief the 11th, President-elect Donald Trump — the President's Daily Briefing has had to adjust to the reading habits and decision-making styles of each commander in chief.

And the ways in which it's produced, read and discussed provide a rare insight into how presidents approach national security issues.

"It’s the only standing meeting he has every day. Even if we don’t have the meeting, he gets the document," said Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes. "Everyday there's the possibility that he'll see something that will cause him to move the entire U.S. government in a new direction. There's nothing else like that."

For Obama, the PDB process paints a portrait of a methodical president who's often disdainful of raw, unfiltered intelligence in favor of more analytical perspective. He encourages dissenting opinions. He's interested in "open source" intelligence — including press accounts and, increasingly, social media — in addition to old-fashioned spycraft and intercepted communications.

President-elect Trump has yet to make a formal mark on intelligence. He's still getting a daily intelligence briefing designed for, and catered to, Obama. He's reading it largely as a courtesy by the incumbent president, part of a bipartisan tradition dating back to President Harry Truman.

But Trump has already suggested a different style of receiving intelligence. For the first month, he received in-person intelligence briefings only once a week, although his transition team now says it's three times a week.

But Trump himself has suggested a more ad hoc system of being updated only when major developments warrant.

"I get it when I need it," Trump told Fox News Sunday.

"I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years," he said. "I don't need that. But I do say, 'If something should change, let us know.' "

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Obama has said much the same about his daily briefing — albeit much later in his presidency.

"Over the years, you accumulate knowledge," Obama said in a YouTube interview earlier this year. "Now, I've got enough of a baseline of knowledge. I've seen problems come up before, I've seen patterns that have emerged. I might not have to go into the briefing book as deeply as I did. ... I'm skimming. I'm looking at, are there significant differences?"

The frequency, the duration, the format, the depth, the subject matter — even the distribution list — are all up to the president.

In a book published earlier this year, former CIA officer David Priess argued that the PDB has had to adapt to each president who has receives it — and will continue to evolve to meet the president's personality, learning style and priorities.

"If a new president comes in and he wants the PDB presented through interpretive dance, he or she will get that," said Priess, author of The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings. "There will be a whole lot of intelligence officers taking dancing lessons."

The President's Daily Briefing is what its name implies, Priess said.

"It is brief. Everything is not going to make it in. It’s daily. If it’s not breaking, or not current, it doesn’t get in," he said. "But the most important word is 'president.' Is this deserving of his attention?"

That's a question that the intelligence community is constantly trying to reassess. And the transition period is a critical time for the incoming president to get up to speed on intelligence issues — and for the intelligence community to get to know the president-elect.

The (expletive) moment

Current and former national security officials say frequent, in-person briefings with the president — and the president-elect — are an essential part of making sure the commander in chief is well-informed.

"There is a certain amount of trial and error to really settle in to what the new team wants," former CIA director Michael Hayden said. In his book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, he describes what the intelligence community crudely refers to as the "aw, s---" moment.

It's attempt by intelligence officials to challenge the worldview of the president-elect's political advisers with a dose of reality. Hayden calls it "phenomenon of the unpleasant fact."

"That's when the intelligence guys give the president information and analysis that cuts across the policy or politics grain of the administration. You're telling them something they don’t want to hear and don’t want to believe," he said.

And it's important to do that in an in-person briefing, as opposed to the written product. "You have to shake the preferred narrative of the policymaker," Hayden said. "And you need the ability to do that face to face, and to do it with your tone, and your words and your body language to communicate, as opposed to just throwing it over the transom."

When Obama first took office, the intelligence community grumbled that Obama — or at least his national security staff — wanted the reports so brief that they called them "PDB haiku."

Hayden's early briefings of Obama (he was replaced three weeks into Obama's presidency) were "far less tactical" than the briefings President George W. Bush was receiving.

But Michael Leiter, who directed the National Counterterrorism Center under both Bush and Obama, said he saw Obama grow in his use of intelligence from those early months.

"His inclination from the start was less about the tactics and more about the strategy, and more about how the U.S. was perceived in the world and interacted in the world," he said.

"But there certainly was an evolution. To me, that was most crystallized, around the time of underwear bomber," he said, referring to the Christmas Day 2009 plot to bring down a Detroit-bound airliner. "That so changed the president's perception of how detail oriented he had to be on these things."

From then on, he said, any terrorism threat the president was briefed about also had to include an operational briefing about what was being done to address it.

Dissenting voices

Still, it's a difficult balancing act for the president and his briefing team. Rhodes said the president needs to be disciplined enough not to be distracted by the uncorroborated bits of information — or to attribute more credibility to information only because it's classified. "Sometimes you are so focused on what is secret that you're not looking at what's right in front of your eyes," Rhodes said in an interview with USA TODAY before the election.

"It’s worrisome to get into raw intelligence," he said. "Because you may have some intercept that you think is great, but it could be some official in some country, it could be just their view, or what they hope happens. Or, sometimes they know that the (National Security Agency) is listening, and they want us to intercept that raw intelligence. That's where the job of ODNI is very hard."

ODNI is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an office created by Congress in 2004 in a series of post-9/11 intelligence reforms. While the briefing is assembled by ODNI with input from the entire intelligence community, the CIA — by virtue of its historic role and experience in analysis — still has an outsized role in the process.

Obama has said he's conscientious about hearing from a broad array of experts. "I've learned to be pretty good at listening carefully to people who know a lot more than I do about a topic," Obama said in the YouTube interview. "And taking sure that any dissenting voices are in the same room at the same time."

But while Obama says he listens to all voices, not all of those voices feel that they're being heard.

A 2014 report from the Intelligence Community Inspector General interviewed intelligence analysts across the government and found that "broader community participation in the President's Daily Brief (PDB) remains a challenge."

Rhodes said the president has increasingly asked for lower-level analysts who are experts in a political topic to brief him personally — a practice that has been going on at least since Jimmy Carter's presidency. "Let's get the analysts who are living through these issues every day," Rhodes said. "He likes that, so he's tried to do that more."

The daily book often contains dissenting views, which Leiter said were "often the most illuminating thing in a PDB article."

And under Obama, non-urgent raw intelligence often gets shopped around the intelligence community for corroboration and analysis before making it to the president. And highly sensitive information gleaned from top-secret sources and methods is balanced with open-source intelligence — the kind of information that's available to anyone reading a newspaper.

'Rebalancing' the PDB

Presidents, of course, also send signals back to the intelligence community about their policy priorities — and that gets reflected in their briefings.

Richard Nixon's had a heavy emphasis on Vietnam and China. Ronald Reagan's was almost singularly obsessed with the Soviet Union. And for the last two presidents, the Middle East has dominated the PDB — to the extent that the White House has occasionally had to remind intelligence agencies that Obama wants a wider aperture.

"You could write the PDB every day and never talk about anything except the Middle East and Russia," Rhodes said. "To the point where we’ve had to say, 'Hey, guys, we're rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific. Make sure that's represented in the PDB.' You almost have to reach out for that stuff, because it doesn't always naturally come up."

Obama's PDB also increasingly includes information on economic, environmental and public health crises that could have an impact on national security. And they're not necessarily confined to foreign affairs. Last summer, deputy press secretary Eric Schultz confirmed that Obama had been briefed on the spread of the Zika virus in Florida as part of his daily intelligence briefing.

World's most exclusive newspaper

The President's Daily Briefing, also known as "the book," is among the most secret documents the government keeps. For a time, even its very existence was thought to be classified.

It's just one of dozens of products regularly produced by the intelligence community. But because it gets the attention of the commander in chief, it has a sense of urgency and importance — and even mystique — that other top secret documents don't have.

"Today it is such a vital part of how the White House operates that one can hardly imagine the modern presidency without it," said CIA Director John Brennan as the agency declassified 2,500 briefings to Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson last year. "The PDB is the most abundantly staffed, most deeply sourced daily information service in the world."

It's been referred to as the world's most exclusive daily newspaper, written exclusively for the president of the United States.

But presidents can and do share the PDB with a small circle of advisers.

Kennedy never shared his with his vice president. Nixon deeply distrusted the CIA and often ignored the briefing, instead delegating it to national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

The younger Bush restricted the distribution to just six or seven people. In the Obama administration, the distribution list is thought to be as many as two dozen, including the secretary of State. In her book Hard Choices, Clinton called the hand-delivered report the "first order of business" after getting to the office each morning. Her schedules, released under the Freedom of Information Act, often allotted the first five minutes of every morning to reading the PDB.

The president could even share the briefing with members of his family. Trump and his family have denied reports that he's sought security clearances for his children and for son-in-law Jared Kushner, but the president is the ultimate authority on how classified information can be shared and with whom.

Trump has also raised eyebrows by appearing to question the CIA's integrity in the wake of reports that the spy agency had concluded that Russia deliberately interfered in the election to get Trump elected. "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," the Trump transition said in a statement to reporters last week.

That prompted the White House to defend the intelligence officers — and suggest that Trump would do well to listen to them.

"President Obama’s experience over the last eight years has been that the men and women of the intelligence community in the United States are patriots," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday. "President Obama is certainly not the first president to have enjoyed the benefits of the experts in our intelligence community, and I'm confident the president-elect would benefit from that advice if he remains open to it."