Biden Names His Chief of Staff

Klain, a Veteran Democratic Staffer, Had Same Role for Gore

Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. turned to one of the most experienced Democratic staffers in Washington yesterday in naming as his chief of staff Ronald A. Klain, a longtime trusted adviser with an intimate knowledge of how the White House operates.

Klain, a Harvard-trained lawyer who first worked for Biden on Capitol Hill in 1987, will be reprising a role he played in the later years of the Clinton administration, when he was chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore.

Though he does not have a long history with President-elect Barack Obama -- he helped the Illinois Democrat prepare for the fall debates -- Klain is a loyal Democrat known for his even keel and keen intellect.

Like Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), who is slated to be Obama's chief of staff, Klain comes to the job with a firsthand familiarity of the politics of the White House.

"He knows exactly where everything is," said Democratic analyst and Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile. Referring to the narrow street separating the White House and the suite of vice presidential offices, she said: "He probably has a shortcut from the Old Executive Office Building to the Oval Office."

Klain, 47, might best be described as a young old hand. His résumé and Rolodex stretch from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other and across all three branches of government. "He's excited about it," said Michael S. Berman, who served as Vice President Walter F. Mondale's counsel. "The White House is a unique political experience. You're in the middle of everything."

Klain was not available to comment on the new appointment.

In the course of his career, Klain has advised several Democratic presidential nominees, clerked at the Supreme Court, held a top position at the Justice Department, been a partner in a Washington law firm and advised Obama confidant and former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle. He now serves as general counsel at Revolution Health, an online wellness company started by AOL founder Steve Case.

After being passed over for a prominent role in Gore's presidential campaign, Klain left the Clinton administration in July 1999. A year later, he returned to run the campaign's Tennessee command center, known as the "boiler room," and then spearheaded Gore's post-election recount efforts in Florida. Kevin Spacey portrayed Klain in the HBO movie "Recount," the dramatization of the 36-day court battle over the results of the 2000 presidential election.

"Every time I heard him talk about [the movie], it was in a humorous way," said Lisa Brown, a friend of Klain's who was Gore's counsel. "It was just this fun thing, like 'Holy cow!' "

The pull of politics has been a constant throughout Klain's life. As a student at Georgetown University, the Indiana native took time off to work on the campaign of his home-state Democratic Sen. Birch Bayh. Between graduation and law school, he again deferred his studies to work for Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who was considering a run for the Senate.

"Ron's an extraordinary multitasker," said John Barrett, a professor at St. John's University School of Law, who has been a friend since college. "He reads fast, writes fast and is a fast typist."

After finishing first in his class at Harvard Law School, Klain was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White. Biden then hired him as the youngest chief counsel ever for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"He was very calm and deliberative," said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who also recruited Klain to help him prepare for his presidential campaign debates in 2004.

It was Klain who got the early-morning telephone call in 1991 from renowned constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe that there was more to pursue regarding the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas.

"I had received news that Anita Hill had some important new testimony that the Senate Judiciary Committee would have been embarrassed not to have heard," Tribe recalled telling Klain. "He was very calm. He said, 'I'll let Joe know.' "

Over the years, Tribe has observed in his former student "a great capacity to say no without making people feel bad."

After working on the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992, Klain was rewarded with a series of high-profile jobs, including as associate counsel to the president and chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno. He served as Gore's top aide from 1995 to 1999.

Some Democrats expressed surprise that Klain would leave the lucrative private sector to return to a job he has previously done.

But Roy Neel, who was Gore's chief of staff during the first Clinton administration, said the prospect of joining the Obama administration is "seductive" to Democrats who have been out of power for eight years.

"This is going to be an activist administration, and you want to be where the action is," he said.

Despite the searing defeat of 2000, Klain's return to the Old (officially, the Eisenhower) Executive Office Building makes sense, said his college friend.

"Ron is a very idealistic person; always has been, always will be," Barrett said. "Ron still believes in this stuff as much as he did when he was 20."