Rice to Replace Donilon in the Top National Security Post
Obama Bets on Rice's Redemption: The Times's Mark Landler discusses the White House's decision to put Susan E. Rice back in the harsh spotlight as the national security adviser.
By MARK LANDLER
Published: June 5, 2013 370 Comments
WASHINGTON — In a major shakeup of President Obama’s foreign-policy inner circle, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, is resigning and will be replaced by Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said late Tuesday.
The appointment, which Mr. Obama plans to make on Wednesday afternoon, puts Ms. Rice, 48, an outspoken diplomat and a close political ally, at the heart of the administration’s foreign-policy apparatus.
It is also a defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. The post of national security adviser, while powerful, does not require Senate confirmation.
Mr. Obama also plans to nominate Samantha Power, a National Security Council official, as Ms. Rice’s replacement at the United Nations on Wednesday. Ms. Power, who has written extensively about genocide, is closely allied with Ms. Rice on human rights issues.
A central member of Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy team since he first took office, Mr. Donilon, 58, has exerted sweeping influence, mostly behind the scenes, on issues from counterterrorism to the reorientation of America to Asia from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Among his last big projects was negotiating the highly unusual informal meeting between Mr. Obama and President Xi Jinping of China on Friday at an estate in Southern California. Mr. Donilon, just back from talks in Beijing, clearly took pride of ownership.
“I don’t know when there was a broad meeting like this,” he said in an interview. “For the last 40 years or so, these conversations have taken place in a more formal, scripted context.”
But Mr. Donilon has also hit a rough patch recently, with the publication of an unflattering profile in Foreign Policy magazine that cast him as a sharp-elbowed infighter and a domineering boss, who had strained relationships with colleagues, including his former deputy, Denis R. McDonough, now the White House chief of staff.
Mr. Donilon and Mr. McDonough, however, both denied those reports, with Mr. McDonough saying he had a “very good relationship with Tom.” He added, “It pains me to think anybody would think he’s leaving because of me.”
Mr. Donilon, whose departure is effective early July, said he had planned to leave after Mr. Obama’s first term but stayed on at the president’s request to break in a new team led by Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan.
He pointed to the unusual harmony among Cabinet heavyweights like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and chalked up reports of unhappy subordinates to the relentless grind of working in the White House.
“I cherish my staff,” he said. “They are a national treasure.”
Mr. McDonough said Mr. Donilon’s greatest policy legacy would be his role in engineering the pivot to Asia. In a statement, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said, “I’ve worked with eight different administrations and even more national security advisers, and I’ve never met anyone with more talent and with greater strategic judgment.”
The president recently nominated Mr. Donilon’s wife, Cathy Russell, a former chief of staff to Jill Biden, as the State Department’s ambassador at large for global women’s issues — a job that will impose heavy work and travel demands of its own on a family that has seen little of Mr. Donilon since 2009. The Donilons have two children, aged 14 and 16.
For Ms. Rice, the appointment amounts to redemption after she withdrew from consideration as secretary of state because Republicans threatened to block her nomination over Benghazi.
Mr. Obama steadfastly defended Ms. Rice, and after he nominated John Kerry instead of her, White House officials said she became the front-runner to succeed Mr. Donilon, who has been in the job since October 2010 and had been the principal deputy before that.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/us/politics/tom-donilon-to-resign-as-national-security-adviser.html?hp
