Obama's 4 a.m. call: Crisis and a workout

by Mark Silva

Waking up the president at a time of crisis.

Hillary Rodham Clinton warned the public about it, with a campaign commercial asking who you want answering the phone at the White House at 3 a.m. when the kids are sleeping.

Obama got a call -- at 4 a.m. -- it turns out.

He fielded it, and then went to the gym.

So goes the story from some of Obama's senior advisers, who sat for an interview in another sort of Situation Room, CNN's, and told Wolf Blitzer about a call about North Korea missile testing that they fielded -- and about waking the president.

Waking the president often falls to the press secretary, says Robert Gibbs, who also got to wake the president at dawn the day he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

"The scary thing is the person who has to wake Gibbs up,'' says presidential adviser David Axerod.

As for Obama, Axelrod say, he's not so much a morning-person as a squeezing-both ends-person: A "morning workout person, an evening reading person. He does a lot of heavy reading at night. He has about two hours of homework every night and then he reads books and magazines after he's done with that. So he squeezes the day''.

Their interview shows this afternoon. See an excerpt here:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Was there a 3:00 a.m. wake-up call for the president over the past year that you remember where there was some sort of international crisis...

DAVID AXELROD, WHITE HOUSE SENIOR ADVISER: On the road when North Korea launched...

ANITA DUNN, WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Yeah...

ROBERT GIBBS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Yeah. For some reason waking the president up from slumber falls unnecessarily on the press secretary at times.

AXELROD: The scary thing is the person who has to wake Gibbs up.

BLITZER: Well, I thought usually Rahm Emanuel the chief of staff should have that job shouldn't he?

GIBBS: You know I'm going to give him that job the next time there's something...We all were in a room in -- on the first foreign trip in Prague in the Czech Republic when we were notified of the North Koreans testing a long-range missile, something we'd expected to happen over a certain amount of time. And I think it was about 4:00 in the morning we were in there and we then discussed that and I went to wake him up and he soon joined all of us in getting intelligence briefings from in the room as well as back in D.C.

AXELROD: We were kind of a mess. He came in there, he was...

GIBBS: Speak for yourself.

AXELROD: I was a bigger mess than you. I mean just physically... But he came in, sat down, got a read up on the military people, got on the line with Secretary Gates, General Cartwright I think. And then he says, "OK. Here's what we're going to do" bing, bing, bing.

BLITZER: Did he go back to sleep?

AXELROD: No, he went out to the gym. He said I'm going to go work out and I'll be up.

BLITZER: Really. He's more of a morning person than an evening person. Is that right?

GIBBS: A little bit of both.

AXELROD: A morning workout person, an evening reading person. He does a lot of heavy reading at night. He has about two hours of homework every night and then he reads books and magazines after he's done with that. So he squeezes the day.