Another World

Sutphen passed the foreign service exam right out of college, but ended up in Chicago working for the advertising agency Leo Burnett. After a few years, she decided that "if I'm going to be staying up until 3 a.m. it should be for world peace and not shampoo sales."

During George H.W. Bush's administration, the foreign service called her. She called Lake.

"I asked him, 'What should I do if I don't agree with policy in South Africa or El Salvador?' " she recalled. "He said, 'Well, don't bid on those posts.' "

She headed for the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, where she managed the human rights portfolio for Burma, then on to an assignment helping implement the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. After a hiatus to study at the London School of Economics, she went to work for then-U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, whom she met during her work on Burma.

When Richardson went to run the Energy Department, Sutphen moved to the White House to be Berger's special assistant. She shared a cubicle with Nina Hachigian, special assistant to Berger's deputy, Jim Steinberg. The two put in grueling hours, but in their small amount of spare time they worked on what Sutphen described as a "terrorism-thriller" screenplay that didn't find a market in a still-raw post-9/11 America.

A decade later, Hachigian, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, effectively the administration's off-campus think tank, and Sutphen published "The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise." In a blurb on the back of the original 2008 edition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, then the dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, describes it as "a wonderful corrective. . . . It recognizes that national security begins at home, with education, health care, infrastructure."

"We thought we were writing a foreign policy book, but what we learned in the end is that if the United States wants to strengthen its position in the world, it has a lot to do at home," Hachigian said. "Mona is extremely unsentimental. She doesn't cling to the way she'd like things to be. She sees them as they are."

Before she left the White House, Sutphen met her future husband in the Situation Room. Clyde Williams was helping plan the 1998 Israeli-Palestinian talks at Wye River, Md. The two met during a planning session and began dating soon after.

Williams accompanied Bill Clinton to Harlem in 2001 as a senior adviser to the Clinton Foundation. After a brief stint at an Internet start-up in Silicon Valley, Sutphen was pulled back to Washington by Berger, who had started the Stonebridge International business consulting firm. She and Williams married and began a family, juggling long-hour jobs and two cities.

Something had to give. Sutphen, then the company's chief operating officer, decided to move to New York City after the 2004 elections.

Sutphen and Williams, now the political director of the Democratic National Committee, met Obama at a private party in a Washington home before he had decided to run for president. Sutphen recalls Williams telling her, "I hope he doesn't run because then I'll have to choose between him and Hillary."

"Politics for me is about loyalty," Williams said. "The Clintons opened up my world."