Jay P. Lefkowitz?

During his first summer in the White House, a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that would shape his presidency, President Bush went on prime-time television to announce that he would allow federal money to pay for a limited amount of research on stem cells from human embryos.

The architect of that policy, navigating ethically and politically treacherous terrain, was a litigator named Jay P. Lefkowitz who was working as general counsel in the White House's Office of Management and Budget. Eight months later, Bush would promote Lefkowitz to deputy assistant to the president overseeing domestic policy. Many White House watchers expected that the cerebral neoconservative, whose judgment the president so clearly trusted, would rise further still.

Instead, Lefkowitz decamped from the White House -- and Washington -- in 2003. And although he is reluctant to discuss it, he has twice since then declined to return to top West Wing jobs.

Lefkowitz moved his family to New York, his wife's home town, where they enrolled their three children in a yeshiva, an intensive Jewish school, and became heavily involved in the Orthodox community.

He went back to his old law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, where he has a partnership and an eclectic mix of cases. He has been representing a large generic-drug manufacturer in lawsuits against the Food and Drug Administration (he beat the government twice); a criminal defendant in a massive tax-shelter fraud case the Justice Department is bringing against the accounting firm KPMG; and corporations such as Verizon and General Motors in commercial litigation.

"I am as engaged right now in the litigation that I'm involved in as I was when I was dealing with immigration issues or stem cell issues or helping to set up the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund," Lefkowitz said.

He has had to weigh his two worlds. "He's at least twice been approached and asked to go back," said a former administration official who knows Lefkowitz and is close to the White House. The first time would have been as deputy chief of staff after Joshua B. Bolten moved from that job to budget director. The official, who spoke about personnel matters on the condition of anonymity, said the second would have been another senior West Wing position after Bolten became Bush's chief of staff last spring.

Lefkowitz still has a part-time role in government -- and the president's ear. He said he was in Jerusalem during Passover in the spring of 2004 when his cellphone rang. It was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asking whether he would be interested in becoming the president's special envoy on human rights in North Korea.

Devoting about one-fifth of his prodigious working hours to the task, he reports to Rice but has, he said, met with Bush "several times."

-- Amy Goldstein