Bush was on to something. When coming face-to-face with the U.S. commander in chief, at the very seat of presidential power, most people choose to avoid confrontation, whether out of discretion, etiquette, nerves, or some combination of the three.

But as the unusual shouting match between President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vice President JD Vance shows, this is not always the case. The Oval Office is a place of high-stakes meetings among people with strongly held beliefs, so it’s not surprising that tempers flare sometimes.

Oval Office confrontations tend to come from those with egos, and statures, who have the willingness to take on the president on his home turf. For the most part, these confrontations have been between presidents and business leaders, aides, and other political leaders. All provide interesting examples of these types of tiffs.

In 1915, Henry Ford went to the White House to press President Woodrow Wilson to keep America out of World War I. Although the meeting started OK, with Ford telling Wilson a Henry Ford joke, Ford wore out his welcome by threatening to go public with his concerns. Wilson got tired of the meeting and had Ford escorted off the White House grounds, which is something presidents have the capacity to do. Ford made good on his threat, but his criticism backfired and ended up more damaging to Ford than to Wilson. Wilson won reelection the next year, and then America entered the war.

Almost 70 years later, President Ronald Reagan was challenged in the Oval Office by a different car executive, Lee Iacocca. Iacocca, who was the head of Chrysler and very much a celebrity CEO, pressed Reagan to advocate a gas tax. Reagan did not much like taxes, and he certainly did not want a gas tax. He said, “Lee, you’re a smart guy, but my pollster tells me I’d commit political suicide if I raised the gas tax.” Reagan also took advantage of the home field setting, telling Iacocca, “That’s why you’re sitting on that side of the desk, and I’m the president.”

White House aides can also occasionally raise their voices around the president over policy or personnel problems. One of the most legendary Oval Office confrontations took place in 1947, when President Harry Truman gathered aides to debate whether the United States should recognize Israel. Secretary of State George Marshall was against recognition and was annoyed when junior White House aide Clark Clifford started to make the case for it. Marshall told the president, “I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter.” Truman defended Clifford, saying, “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be.” The president’s defense of Clifford did not deter Marshall, who then added, “I fear that the only reason Clifford is here is so that he can press for a political solution of this issue. I do not think that politics should play any role in our decision.” Marshall kept pressing the point beyond the bounds of propriety. According to Marshall’s recollection, “I said bluntly that if the president were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the president.” Clifford recalled that this statement “was so shocking that it just kind of lay there for 15 or 20 seconds and nobody moved.” Later, Truman told Clifford: “Well, that was rough as a cob.” It may have been rough, but Clifford won the battle, as Truman agreed to recognize Israel.

In the Ford administration, a very disorganized speechwriting operation led to one unruly Oval Office situation. During a challenging economic period, President Gerald Ford’s staff had serious disagreements over the form and content of the 1975 State of the Union address, his first one to the nation. The Ford team prepared two versions but could not agree on which one to give, which led to what Ford aide David Gergen called “a showdown meeting in the Oval Office … [with] like 16 of us in the room in a big circle.” They read the two versions, and 14 of the 16 voted for the more thematic version. The other one, which Gergen called more of “a laundry list,” got two votes, that of Robert Hartmann, the cantankerous speechwriter who wrote it, and Ford. The entire process did not serve Ford well, and he got only three hours of sleep and had little time to prepare for one of the most important speeches of his presidency.

Another interesting Reagan administration confrontation took place on the personnel front. In 1983, a group of top aides conspired to force out Judge William Clark, an old Reagan associate, as national security adviser. Under the plan, chief of staff Jim Baker would get the national security adviser job, and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver would step into Baker’s shoes. When CIA Director William Casey objected to the widely suspected leaker Baker moving to the National Security Council, the plan fell apart, enraging Deaver. Deaver even shouted at Reagan, “You don’t have enough confidence in me to make me chief of staff.” Reagan, who did not like confrontation, was unmoved, and Deaver never became chief of staff.

The third type of confrontation takes place among political leaders, be they domestic or foreign. President Lyndon B. Johnson did plenty of yelling at people in the Oval Office, but he was unaccustomed to anyone shouting back. One person who was willing to push back against Johnson was his nemesis, Robert F. Kennedy, who disagreed with Johnson over the Vietnam War. Kennedy visited Europe in early 1967 in his capacity as senator, which led to a story in Newsweek saying that Kennedy received a proffer of peace from the North Vietnamese on his trip. Johnson was furious. 

Kennedy denied the story in a Feb. 6, 1967, Oval Office meeting, adding that the leak had come “from your State Department.” Johnson responded, “It’s not my State Department. It’s your goddamn State Department!” He then began to berate Kennedy, threatening, “I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends. You’ll be politically dead in six months.” Kennedy pushed back, suggesting, “Say you’ll stop the bombing if they’ll come to the negotiating table.” Johnson blew up again, saying, “There just isn’t a chance in hell that I will do that. Not the slightest chance in the world.” The meeting lasted an hour and 20 minutes, with Johnson spending most of the time yelling at Kennedy. According to Kennedy aide Peter Edelman, who saw Kennedy afterward, “I seldom saw him shaken, but he came back shaken from that meeting.”

All of the above incidents took place behind closed doors, and we only know about them from subsequent accounts. But in 2011, in a televised Oval Office meeting, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back on then-President Barack Obama’s pressure to move to peace talks based on Israel’s 1967 borders, telling Obama multiple times, “It’s not gonna happen.” Obama was reportedly furious afterward. His adviser Ben Rhodes said of the incident, “I have never seen a foreign leader speak to the president like that, and certainly not in public, and I’ve never — certainly never seen it happen in the Oval Office.” 

The incident was in keeping with Netanyahu’s philosophy, derived from his mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky, to appeal directly to the citizens in democratic countries, even if it means going over the heads of their elected leaders. Netanyahu did something similar at a joint press conference with then-President Bill Clinton in 1996, although not in the Oval Office. Clinton was also angry over the incident, later fuming, “Who’s the f***ing leader of the free world?” Bibi felt that he might have overstepped in that instance, writing in his 2022 memoir that he “may have overreacted in my tone to the White House campaign of political pressure that preceded and accompanied the visit.”

In both the Clinton and Obama incidents, Netanyahu got to make his case, but at the cost of alienating the American president. For their parts, each president got a measure of revenge. Clinton sent some of his political aides to help Ehud Barak defeat Netanyahu in his 1999 reelection effort. 

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Obama, on his way out the door in 2016, allowed the United Nations to pass an anti-Israel resolution that had Obama’s fingerprints on it. Netanyahu, for his part, managed to survive beyond both of those presidencies and is still very much on the political scene today.

These incidents show that taking on the president in the Oval Office is a high-stakes gamble. There can be political benefits to standing up to the president, and if televised, it can allow one to get a message to a wide audience. At the same time, the Oval Office is very much the president’s home turf, which makes the endeavor a tough one for the challengers.

Washington Examiner contributing writer Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a former White House aide for George W. Bush. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including, most recently, The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.