Thomas Donilon

National Security Adviser (since October 2010)

(Pete Souza / White House)

Why He Matters

For a long time, Donilon lived his life from presidential campaign to campaign.

The Democratic operative worked on his first Democratic National Convention at 24, and he's been helping elect candidates ever since. He has worked for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Joseph R. Biden, and now for President Obama as his national security adviser.

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Background

At a Glance

Career History: National Security Adviser (since January 2009-October 2010); Member of Barack Obama' s transition team for the State Department Review; Senior Aide, Sen. Joseph Biden 's Presidential Campaign; Senate Majority's National Security Advisory Group (2005 to 2007)
Hometown: Providence, R.I.
Alma Mater: Catholic University, B.A., 1977; University of Virginia, J.D., 1985

Spouse: Catherine Russell
Web site

Path to Power

Donilon was born in Providence, R.I.

He was inspired to go into politics after reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail by Hunter S. Thompson in high school. He moved to Washington, D.C., for college, receiving his undergraduate degree from Catholic University in 1977.

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Donilon accepted an internship as an aide to President Jimmy Carter and quickly climbed the political ranks. According to The Washington Post's Jason Horowitz, Hamilton Jordan, Carter's then-chief of staff, called the White House when Donilon was a 23-year-old intern looking for dirt on which Cabinet officials had refused to campaign with the president in his troubled 1980 reelection effort. Donilon not only dug up the research, but personally delivered it to Camp David. Carter fired all of his cabinet secretaries a week later.

Campaign Veteran

In 1980, at the age of 24, Donilon worked on the Democratic National Convention and helped thwart Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's (D-Mass.) last-minute bid for the presidential nomination.

Four years later, Donilon helped Carter transition back to private life after he lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan.

Four years after that, Donilon was back on the national stage as campaign coordinator for 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale.

He earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1985 and was a member of the school's Law Review.

In 1988, Donilon served as one of then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden's (D-Del.) closest advisers during his presidential campaign. Biden was fresh off a stint as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, where he presided over the most controversial U.S. Supreme Court nomination ever by considering Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork.

As informal campaign adviser, Donilon played a key role in successfully convincing the Senate to defeat Bork's nomination.

When Biden lost his presidential bid after being accused of plagiarism, Donilon became a senior adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign.

In 1991, Donilon joined O'Melveny & Meyers law firm as a partner. He was on the firm's governing committee and headed its strategic counseling practice. Additionally, he led the firm's effort to increase its pro-bono work.

He was a senior counsel to President Bill Clinton's 1992 transition effort.

Clinton Administration

Donilon formally entered a presidential administration in 1993, when he was named chief of staff to Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In 1996, he became assistant secretary of state for public affairs. In that role, Donilon visited over 50 countries and worked on several major foreign policy initiatives, including the Balkans peace negotiation, the expansion of NATO and the relationship between the U.S. and China.

Fannie Mae

In 1999, Donilon accepted an executive vice president position at Fannie Mae. He has been accused of painting an unrealistically rosy picture of how the company was doing and of supervising an "aggressive backdoor lobbying campaign to undermine the credibility of a probe into the firm's accounting irregularities," according to ABC News.

Donilon left Fannie Mae in 2005 and returned to O'Melveny. At the same time, he was chosen as a member of the House and Senate Majority's National Security Advisory Group, which was designed to assess U.S. performance on national security issues and to propose ways to improve it.

Donilon could have worked for the 2008 presidential campaign of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), but instead signed on with Biden's presidential effort, advising him on Iraq. When Biden dropped out of the 2008 race, Donilon endorsed Obama.

He and Wendy Sherman led the Obama transition team's State Department efforts. Donilon's wife, Catherine Russell, was named Jill Biden's chief of staff.

Donilon moved into the White House (his office "can charitably be described as a broom closet, according to Al Kamen of The Washington Post) on inauguration day. He was described as the "lynchpin of the interagency process," by Foreign Policy's Laura Rozen. He runs the deputies meetings, where the real policies get drafted.

The Issues

Donilon and Obama share the same stances on key foreign policy questions. Donilon would like to end the war in Iraq, refocus resources on Afghanistan and keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon through diplomacy and stronger sanctions.

But his first months as national security adviser, and perhaps his entire tenure, were marked by the historic uprising in the Middle East. Dubbed the "Arab Spring," it consisted of a series of popular revolts that roiled the Middle East in 2011, toppling the governments of Egypt and Bahrain and prompting NATO military intervention in Libya. The crisis demanded the U.S. balance its not-always consistent "values and interests"in the crucial region, where many countries are key allies in fighting terrorism.

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Arab Spring

In April 2011, Donilon said there were four principles on which the administration was operating in regards to the 2011 Middle Eastern uprising: that the nature of the change is "historic;" that the popular revolts have "deep roots" in bad governance and demographic chance; that any country can be affected; and that the U.S. cannot dictate the outcome.

Killing bin Laden

Under Donilon's watch at the NSC, the world's most-wanted terrorist, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden was killed by U.S. special forces after years of painstaking intelligence work.

On May 1, 2011, President Obama ordered a risky special-operations raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan that U.S. intelligence officials had been monitoring for months. Inside the compound, they found and killed bin-Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the target of a massive and frustrating 10-year manhunt.

bin Laden's body was removed from the compound, idenfitied positively through DNA evidenve, and buried after administering Islamic rites and rituals, at sea.

"I think we can all agree this is a good day for America. Our country has kept its commitment to see that justice is done. The world is safer. It is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden," Obama said.

Military Readiness

As a member of the National Security Advisory Group, Donilon helped write a 2006 report that suggested the long Iraq deployment had depleted the Army and Marine Corps' ability to defend the country. The commission found that not a single non-deployed Army brigade was prepared to fight.

Iran and North Korea

Donilon views a nuclear Iran and North Korea as the gravest national security threat facing the country. He has called on the president to pursue robust diplomacy along with stricter sanctions on these two states.

National Conventions

Donilon's specialty, he says, is political conventions. He helped manage the Carter campaign activities at the 1980 Democratic convention, managed Democratic Party activities at the 1984 convention and was the top legal officer for the DNC's convention selection committee in 1985.

Donilon admits an interest in the unusual minutia of conference planning. "You've got to be off just a few degrees to be interested in telephone systems at national conventions," he told the New York Times.

The Network

As a perennial campaigner, Donilon has built a wide network of Democratic connections over the course of staffing eight presidential campaigns. Donilon worked on Biden's 2008 campaign with fellow operatives Patrick Caddell, John Martilla and David Doak.

He served on the National Security Advisory Group with Madeleine Albright, Gen. Wesley Clark, John Podesta, Samuel Berger, James Steinberg and Susan Rice. Many of those people went on to top positions in Obama's administration.