For more than six decades, elements of the US intelligence community have delivered the top-secret President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, to the commander in chief every working day – helping each occupant of the White House remain well informed on a wide range of international challenges. It is the most highly classified regular vehicle for passing analytic judgments about world affairs to the president, a direct and uninterrupted channel which most other US government departments and agencies lack. Access to this book of secrets has always been limited to a circle of senior officials.

CNN reported last month that the administration of Donald Trump is tightly restricting access to the PDB. Its exclusive club of readers is, it seems, getting even smaller.

Tracing the evolution of a dozen presidents’ choices about the PDB’s dissemination provides a unique window into intelligence-policy relations at the highest level – and shows how the delivery of this most sensitive intelligence product reflects the incumbent president’s style more than any other factor.

The President’s Daily Brief has been provided, by that name, since December 1964. Every prime recipient has changed its format or its distribution, often both. And yet, for all the differences in its readership over the past 60 years, the PDB’s daily delivery to the White House has remained a rare constant in a city seemingly defined by change.

The origins of this personalised product provide clues to its endurance. Although Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had received daily intelligence compilations, those materials were not written and edited to match their individual style and preferences. But when John F. Kennedy became president, his military aide changed that. He had discovered quickly that the plethora of existing intelligence publications were not working: too much jargon, too many classification markings, not enough focus on what the president really needed to know.

That aide in June 1961 invited two CIA officers to the White House and asked them to produce one concise document each morning that he could give to Kennedy, something that would tell him only what he needs to know, in a conversational style avoiding bureaucratic government-speak and in a format matching Kennedy’s frenetic pace: small enough to fold, put into a suit pocket, and carry around throughout the day for easy access between meetings.

One of the CIA officers at the meeting resisted the urge to smirk, because he had talked to his colleagues at the agency when Kennedy had taken office about how useful just such a potential publication could be. So they raced back and worked up a prototype overnight, setting a bureaucratic land-speed record that would impress even today’s aficionados of extreme government efficiency. The military aide approved it, and the very next day – a Saturday morning – Kennedy saw his first President’s Intelligence Checklist (PICL) while sitting on the diving board between laps in the swimming pool at the family’s rented estate in Middleburg, Virginia. Hooking JFK, the PICL became the foundation of presidentially focused daily intelligence from that point on.

Kennedy at first limited the PICL’s distribution to himself, the national security advisor, and a couple of others at the White House. Relatively quickly, he realised that an extremely narrow readership presented problems. Its updates and analysis drove him to query top officers, such as his secretary of state and secretary of defense, but they had not seen the PICL and thus found themselves less than ideally prepared to engage deeply on his urgent issues. Six months after the publication’s genesis, Kennedy added them to the approved reading list. Also getting access over time were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the treasury secretary, and the president’s fraternally connected attorney general.

The CIA officer responsible for producing the document, realising that Vice President Lyndon Johnson had been left off the expanded dissemination list and thus would remain ignorant of each day’s most sensitive intelligence communication to the president, asked the executive secretary of the National Security Council about adding him, too. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the lack of love between Kennedy and Johnson, the answer came back firm and final: ‘Under no circumstances’!

Fast forward to 23 November 1963, one day after JFK’s assassination in Dallas. Newly sworn-in President Johnson, for the first time, was shown the President’s Intelligence Checklist – which, he quickly realised, had previously been withheld from him. He naturally didn’t warm to a product so clearly tailored to the style of his predecessor, so the CIA in December 1964 decided to reformat and rename it, allowing Johnson’s advisers to tell him this new daily document was truly his own. And that’s when the President’s Daily Brief began.

Johnson’s subsequent close attention to the PDB drove other senior officials to want to see the book, but he kept it on a tight leash: by the following summer, distribution remained limited to fewer than a dozen people. Recipients included National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, four other officials at the Pentagon, National Security Council Executive Secretary Bromley Smith, and (oddly) Press Secretary and Special Assistant to the President Bill Moyers. De facto Chief of Staff Marvin Watson, though not a formal recipient, also saw the book every day.

This roster set a loose precedent for the distribution of the book of secrets in the administrations that followed. While the recipient list has waxed and waned across the decades, it has always included the president and the national security advisor, and it almost always has included the vice president, secretaries of state and defense, the White House chief of staff, and one or more senior National Security Council staff members.

The first PDB handoff between presidents came in January 1969. It remains uncertain if LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon, paid much attention to the PDB delivered to him every working day, but his administration set the record for the book’s narrowest circle of readers. At one point, Nixon limited its formal dissemination to just himself and Henry Kissinger – who, by that point, was serving as both secretary of state and national security advisor. Echoing the Kennedy-Johnson experience, Nixon initially didn’t allow his second vice president, Gerald Ford, to see the PDB. A prod from the CIA director brought Ford into the reading circle, however, and the VP quickly became a fan of his daily in-person briefings from an intelligence analyst – making Ford the first president or vice-president to maintain face-to-face PDB sessions with a working-level officer.

During his first year as president, starting in August 1974, Ford held onto those in-person briefings while opening up the PDB’s distribution – but only a bit, keeping even his first secretary of defense, Jim Schlesinger, out of the loop. The PDB made its way back into the Pentagon only in March 1976, after Donald Rumsfeld had replaced Schlesinger.

The presidential transitions up to this point had failed to clearly lock in PDB precedents. Johnson and Ford came into office due, respectively, to the irregularities of Kennedy’s assassination and Nixon’s resignation; even Nixon’s own entry into office had been odd, relative to the PDB, which looked to him merely like a creation of the Johnson years. The book of secrets was not yet a storied institution.

Jimmy Carter’s presidency was important therefore for the endurance of the publication. Ford had allowed president-elect Carter to see his PDB during the transition – a courtesy that has continued with only minor glitches ever since – and this incoming commander in chief became a fan. Carter decided early on to maximise the amount of highly sensitive material in the PDB by limiting its formal distribution to only his national security advisor, vice president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense. ‘It wasn’t necessary for all cabinet members and their deputies to know the most highly sensitive information,’ he told me in 2013. A few others still found a way to read it. The vice president’s national security advisor, for example, saw it each day – a development apparently natural enough to everyone involved that nobody balked at that official’s detailed advice to the CIA in 1979 about how to improve the PDB’s usefulness to the president.

Since the Carter years, the general trend has been toward wider distribution of the PDB. This makes sense; as national security matters have become more complex and have involved ever wider circles of executive branch activity, other officials have emerged as natural potential recipients, and assistants and aides are more likely to find a way onto the short list.

This was certainly true during the administration of Ronald Reagan, when the distribution widened to include atypical officials such as Counselor Ed Meese and Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. And the book’s handling became less tightly controlled, with copies of the PDB sometimes passed around the White House for other eyes to see – bothering, in particular, Vice President George H. W. Bush. His national security assistant recalls that when Bush saw a list of all the people who had access to the PDB, he was ‘amazed’. As a former CIA director, Bush knew more than most the damage a loose PDB could do. ‘Some West Wingers left it lying around’, Bush told me in 2012. ‘It really disturbed and upset me.’

Perhaps it’s then natural that, upon reaching the presidency himself, Bush cracked down. He ordered the CIA to deliver the PDB by hand to only the few senior White House officials attending his daily intelligence meeting in the Oval Office (usually the national security advisor and his deputy, the White House chief of staff, and sometimes the vice president) and to the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bush insisted that each recipient follow his own method of receiving the PDB: a CIA officer would deliver the book directly to the principal, brief it orally or hang back while the recipient read its content, answer questions or record them for CIA experts to respond to later, and return the book immediately to Langley. Even Bush handed his own copy back to his briefer.

His successor, Bill Clinton, allowed the PDB to be distributed more widely within the White House and beyond than any previous president had done. Readers around Washington eventually grew to more than two dozen people. At the Pentagon, for example, the book soon went not only to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but also both of their deputies. The deputy chief of staff at the White House joined the club, too. This expanded readership made sense given Clinton’s style; he often included a wide range of national security officials – not just the most senior ones – in foreign policy deliberations, so having a wider circle of people on the same intelligence page with him brought advantages.

Probably due in part to the influence of his father’s experience as CIA director, vice president, and president, George W. Bush as president-elect was shocked to see that the Clinton administration’s PDB dissemination list included dozens of officials. He quickly narrowed the distribution to just six people – initially scratching even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff off the list before reconsidering. Later on, he added others, like the attorney general and FBI director, as events warranted.

Bush also introduced a new kind of reader for the PDB: selected visiting heads of state, among them UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. For the latter, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told me in 2012, early discussions, proper precautions, and extensive preparation led to a very different kind of book that day, one able to be shared with Putin. Using the PDB as a unique instrument of statecraft and diplomacy, of course, did not make these foreign dignitaries regular customers of the PDB, any more than did letting occasional US ambassadors and assistant secretaries into the briefing, as Bush also came to do.

By 2013, Barack Obama, exceeding even the relatively broad Clinton-era distribution, let his tablet computer-based PDB go to more than 30 recipients – including Ben Rhodes, the president’s top strategic communications aide and speechwriter, and deputy secretaries of national security departments. A CIA-published history of presidential intelligence notes:

At the end of the Obama administration, PDB content was being produced in three versions each day and being provided to more than 50 people. The most highly restricted version, given to the president and 10 others, included highly sensitive operational information. The second version was provided to a somewhat larger number of readers; it contained some categories of especially sensitive intelligence reports, but did not discuss CIA covert action programs or compartmented programs of the Department of Defense. The third version – still at the Top Secret level, but containing no operationally sensitive information – was delivered and briefed to all other recipients.

Less is known for certain about the PDB’s readers during the past decade. The same CIA-published history does indicate that during President Donald Trump’s first term, while he and Vice President Mike Pence reverted to paper copies of the book and ‘did not choose to use the tablet computer, most of the 40-plus officials who received the PDB early in his administration did. Even such numbers about the PDB’s distribution during the Biden administration and now during the second Trump term remain publicly unknown.

In 2018, the dissemination of Donald Trump’s PDB did make the news when it was announced that presidential senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner would lose his year-long access to the PDB after his background checks were finally completed. Traditionally, few people with access to the PDB have given it up willingly, either because they learn the value for their policy roles of the intelligence contained therein, or because a certain degree of cachet comes with seeing what the president sees.

A rare exception was George Shultz – later treasury secretary and secretary of state – when he ran the Bureau of the Budget for President Nixon in 1970. He received the PDB at that time, but not for long. ‘I decided I was not reading anything useful to me,’ Shultz told me in 2012. ‘I was better off not having it; I told them to stop.’ Most recipients, instead, keep receiving the PDB until they leave their positions or until the president who appointed them leaves office.

Ultimately, it’s up to each president to decide who sees the PDB, although that can devolve to the national security advisor or to senior intelligence community officers in consultation with senior White House officials. And that’s a good thing: it allows the president to restrict the dissemination if he plans to conduct foreign policy with a small circle of advisers and expand it if he intends to consult more widely. There is, in other words, no single ‘right’ answer to the question of PDB distribution, beyond the incumbent president’s style and his goals for its use.