Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Franklin Roosevelt uttered many a memorable phrase, but one observation has clearly not stood the test of time: his caution that those who serve on the White House staff need to have “a passion for anonymity.”

That was before Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President 1960, celebrating the efforts of John F. Kennedy’s staff, and turning Ted Sorenson, Larry O’Brien and company into political celebrities of their own. It was before Jimmy Carter’s young warriors Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell were featured on the cover of Rolling Stone dressed as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Before once-obscure speechwriters and legislative liaisons walked the red carpet into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as cable news analysts dissected their fashion choices. Indeed, for well over half a century, figures who once toiled in the shadows have been standing in the spotlight: on the covers of national magazines and on the televised Sunday salons, not to mention enjoying lucrative post White House careers as celebrity analysts on cable news. Today, you can glance up from Steve Bannon’s brooding presence on the cover of TIME to watch Kellyanne Conway’s latest assertions on ABC or CNN, while ex-White House staffers George Stephanopoulous and David Axelrod parse her meaning. White House spokesman Sean Spicer now has his own impersonator on Saturday Night Live.


For those who find the warmth of that spotlight enticing, there’s a cautionary note: A remarkable number of key White House aides have found that the heat of that spotlight can have the same affect as the sun did on Icarus. Too much time out of the shadows can result in a fatal fall.

It happened to the very first aide to be given the formal title of “chief of staff”—a military post that, fittingly, was brought to the White House by President Dwight Eisenhower, an ex-general who thought it would make the wheels of government turn more swiftly. The occupant of the office, not for the last time, was a political figure who had played a key role in the president’s campaign.

Sherman Adams, the governor of New Hampshire, had shaped the strategy that led Eisenhower—who had not even declared his candidacy—to a resounding primary victory over Sen. Robert Taft, the conservative hero. He then commanded the successful floor fights at the GOP convention that won the nomination for Ike. His reward was a new job that became the second most powerful in the executive branch. Virtually no one, no piece of paper, no policy recommendation, got to the Oval Office except through Adams, who was labeled “the abominable ‘no’ man.” (When someone would say, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if Eisenhower died and Nixon became president?” the answer would come back, “What would happen if Sherman Adams died and Eisenhower became president?”)

The resentment that grew within Republican ranks meant that Adams had no protectors when trouble came. It came in the person of a textile manufacturer named Bernard Goldfine, an old friend of Adams, who had gifted the chief of staff with an expensive vicuna coat and other goodies while being investigated by government agencies. Despite Eisenhower’s plea —“I need him” —Adams was forced to resign.

The same fate befell another New Hampshire governor, John Sununu, who in 1988 rescued Vice President George H.W. Bush from political disaster with a decisive New Hampshire primary win. Like Adams—maybe there’s something in that maple syrup—Sununu ruled with an imperious hand. The New York Times’ description of his role might just as easily have applied to Adams, and many of his successors: “He was Mr. Bush’s gatekeeper, controlling access to the Oval Office and reviewing all paperwork reaching and leaving Mr. Bush’s desk. Mr. Sununu sat in on most major policy discussions and has been the President’s top adviser on many domestic policy and political matters.”

But, like Adams, Sununu was done in by a self-inflicted wound: specifically, the use of military aircraft and government cars for personal travel and business, including a White House car to and from New York to bid at a stamp auction. When his barely disguised firing was announced, there were (unconfirmed) reports that staffers in the White House began singing, “Ding, Dong The Witch Is Dead.”

Adams and Sununu should have taught all future occupants of the office to remember that the key to their title was “staff,” not “chief.” It was a lesson Don Regan did not learn. When the onetime head of Merrill Lynch and Treasury secretary swapped jobs with chief of staff James Baker in 1985, he brought with him that same “my way or the highway approach” of his predecessors. He controlled everything from paper flow to access to the Oval Office to speechwriting.

“Under the system Regan has constructed,” the New York Times wrote in 1986, “the President’s speeches, schedule, paper work and, to some degree, priorities, are now in the singular control of Regan himself. A former Marine from Boston, Regan revels in the fact that he has risen to the pinnacle of success—first on Wall Street and now in Washington—through aggressive gambles, bold ambition and, perhaps most significant, the fact that his critics have consistently underestimated his bureaucratic shrewdness, even cunning.”

Indeed, there were times when Regan seemed to regard himself as the real head of government, working for a slightly befuddled head of state. After a Reagan summit in Iceland with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ended in futility, Regan said publicly: “Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follows a parade down Main Street, cleaning up.”

Such comments—and what they implied about his view of the president—made him the one enemy no staffer should ever make: the first lady. And when the White House became embroiled in a controversy over the sale of arms to Iran and the funding of the anti-Marxist contras in Nicaragua, Nancy Reagan became convinced that Regan was ill-serving the president. He resigned without even supplying the traditional flattering words a departing staffer offers a president. He and Mrs. Reagan later exchanged fire in their respective memoirs; Regan revealing that the former first lady relied on an astrologer to plot the president’s travels, Nancy Reagan asserting that Regan “often acted as if he were the president,” and that no one wanted to work with him because he was “explosive and difficult to deal with.”

In the current White House, it’s hard to imagine that ethical or financial matters will undo a staff member, given the president’s own entanglements—although Conway was “counseled” by officials after she plugged Ivanka’s wares—but it’s not at all hard to imagine trouble for any aide occupying too much of the spotlight. And the trouble this time would come not from the politics-averse first lady, but from POTUS himself, a person long obsessed with publicity and the image of being in charge. Remember what happened to New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton when the city’s plummeting crime rate put him on the cover of TIME magazine? Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani was less than pleased by the attention his subordinate was getting, and shortly thereafter, Bratton was gone. It does not seem too big a reach to suggest that President Donald Trump is not happy with the implication that he is a mere figurehead, doing the bidding of a smarter, shrewder chief strategist.

So here’s a piece of unsolicited advice to the Trump staff, courtesy of Nancy Reagan. The next time a national magazine wants to put you on the cover with a story celebrating “the power behind the throne,” it might be time to start polishing your résumé.