Tom Donilon To Be Obama's National Security Adviser

The White House announced Friday that Gen. James Jones is resigning his post as National Security Adviser, making way for his top deputy, Tom Donilon.

According to the AP reports, President Obama will announce the staff shakeup Friday in a speech from the White House Rose Garden.

Plans of James's resignation were no secret among Washington circles, nor is Donilon's promotion to the top spot, though there had been some buzz last month about him replacing the resigning Rahm Emanuel's as Chief of Staff. That role has since been assumed by Peter Rouse.

Tom Donilon's move to National Security Adviser will be effective in two weeks.

The New York Times provides a little background on Donilon's career:

Mr. Donilon began as young political operative for President Jimmy Carter and later was chief of staff for Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the Clinton administration. He has long operated in the area between politics and national security. He coached Mr. Obama on foreign policy for his debates during the 2008 presidential campaign.

As deputy national security adviser, he has urged what he calls a "re-balancing" of American foreign policy to rapidly disengage American forces in Iraq and to focus more on China, Iran and other emerging challenges. In the Afghanistan-Pakistan review, he argued that the United States could not engage in what he termed "endless war," and has strongly defended Mr. Obama's decision to declare that troops will begin leaving Afghanistan next summer.

The Washington Post notes a potential point of friction within the Administration:

[Donilon]'s been to Afghanistan only once, during Obama's six hours there in the dead of night back in March. (Well, once is probably enough.)

There may be detractors. Defense Secretary Bob Gates, for example, is quoted in Bob Woodward's latest as saying Donilon would be a "disaster" in the job.

Comments

[JSFlorida]

09:47 AM on 10/21/2010

Funny how the biased Huffington Post does not mention Donilon's recent record of lobbying for Fannie Mae and Goldman Sachs during the height of their corruption. Way to display your lack of journalistic integrity.

[heckmepitus]

01:12 AM on 10/09/2010

Political hack.

[J Maness]

08:33 PM on 10/08/2010

Agreed -- too vital a post for a career hack whose entire family are bidden to Biden. You know, Madeleine Albright still knows some stuff and might be willing to help out.

[A-COL]

04:38 PM on 10/08/2010

Headline should have been: ONLY PERSON EVER TO WEAR THE UNIFORM OF OUR COUNTRY IN THE WHITE HOUSE RESIGNS – REPLACED BY EX-FANNIE MAE EXEC VP

If President Obama is genuinely contemplating a shakeup of his White House, I hope he decides to include at least one Veteran - something sorely lacking in his present line up. With General Jones gone, NO One in the West Wing has ever served in the Military.

Who is replacing General Jones? Donilon - a totally unqualified Biden political hack whose main claim to fame is 1999-2005 he was the Executive Vice President for Law & Policy at Fannie Mae (caused the financial melt-down) where he made millions by lobbying against increased regulation. According to ABC-News he was accused of painting an unrealistically rosy picture of how the company was doing and supervised an “aggressive backdoor lobbying campaign … to undermine the credibility of a probe into the firm's accounting irregularities,” . Immediately prior to his Obama appointment, Donilon was a partner in the Washington law firm O'Melveny & Myers, where The Wall Street Journal reported his yearly income as $3.9M; his clients included Citigroup, Inc., Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Obama fundraiser Penny Pritzker – dubbed by the NY Times as a “supreme Tax Cheat.” When the NYT calls a Dem a "Tax Cheat," they're "World-Class" at it!

If you really want to know how I feel, check out my Blog at: http://old-soldier-colonel.blogspot.com/

[margoharris]

10:22 PM on 10/08/2010

LINKY? LINKY? Not that piece of crapola.

[whitegayrepublican]

11:44 AM on 10/09/2010

yeah but speaking as a veteran, so many of us are on the doll of war profiteers though. At that level it's high noon at the corral with the winner taking all. So corp shill - war profiteering ex-military, sounds all the same to me.

[grf67]

03:50 PM on 10/08/2010

Let's hope that he is smart enough to advise getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

[cornerofthemoon]

03:22 PM on 10/08/2010

He looks like John Lithgow.

[Countess]

02:25 PM on 10/08/2010

This man was a corporate lawyer for Goldman Sachs and a lobbyist for Fannie Mae and is eminently unqualified for the position he has been given. There has been no deviation from the foreign policy of G. W. Bush and the pentagon is still running the country.

[pearlx2]

02:17 PM on 10/08/2010

Nobody can believe a WORD that comes out of Bob Woodward's mouth, or his books. That's been proven already.

His co-author of All the President's Men (and his more honest counterpart), Carl Bernstein, said just a couple of days ago on Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC show that Bob Woodward was lying about a Clinton/Biden switch for Vice President in 2012 being on the table. Carl Bernstein has all the integrity in the world and nothing to gain from lying, something no one can ever say about Bob Woodward.

[jahmac]

02:38 PM on 10/08/2010

I heard that too ...as far as i am concerend Woodward is a fifth columnist

[Carl Caroli]

02:04 PM on 10/08/2010

Like the current situation we have in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't a disaster? Give me a break. And the last thing we need is another MIC representative like Jones. It's time to break the grip the military thinks it has on our foreign policy.

[jahmac]

02:35 PM on 10/08/2010

here! here!

[Jim Fourniadis]

01:51 PM on 10/08/2010

Sounds Like Donlion is our guy!

[JSFlorida]

09:49 AM on 10/21/2010

Sure if you like corruption and backroom deals.

[Richard729]

01:27 PM on 10/08/2010

A big problem Obama has is that the military has become more right-wing than ever. During the Bush-Cheney years all the major service academies were infused with Evangelicals. Many of the cadets-midshipmen have engaged in proselytizing and severe hazing activities against non-fundamentalists. Many of those graduates are now senior officers.

General David Petraeus is a registered Republican who said only last year that we would need 650,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan for a period of over 10 years to bring about anything close to stability.

Clearly, he and other right-leaning senior officers have less stomach for the war in Afghanistan under Barack Obama than they did under Bush whom they saw as a convenient lightweight who rubber stamped a disastrous war policy and approved military hardware costs that kept the military industrial complex intact.

Today, the military high brass is simply treading water until a Republican Congress takes over and resumes the open spigot for bloated military spending regardless of the harsh economic stress it puts on the American people and a stretched-to-the-limit all-volunteer armed forces.

If Obama can't get forthright answers from the Pentagon brass in dealing with the losing conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan he should at least be honest with the American people and pull troops out now rather than extending the slow bloodletting that takes us nowhere through 2011.

Break it off now and prepare for much more formidable foes, Iran and China.

[wkb2texans]

01:52 PM on 10/08/2010

ladies and gentlemen ...

For your half-time entertainment ....

A guy who knows zippo/zilch/squat about the military ...

Yet who yacks on for 6 paragraphs ....

[Richard729]

09:36 PM on 10/08/2010

Yeah, I'll bet you think Newt Gingrich is an expert on the military. "Women would have trouble staying in ditches “because they get infections;” “males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”

Or General William Boykin who said ""my god was a real god and his was an idol" People like Boykin hurt both our military and our country with his bigotry yet his ideology is embraced by a military that has become more political than at any time since Douglas MacArthur who thought he was in charge.

I wore the uniform of my country for four years. That doesn't make me better than any other American. The highest honor we have is to be an American citizen.

The real haters of our country are obstructionist Republicans who when they were in control sent millions of U.S. jobs to foreign countries. They slam out of work Americans calling them "lazy bums." Real compassionate Christians!

You know squat, period!

[pearlx2]

02:19 PM on 10/08/2010

It doesn't matter what the politics or the wishes of the military brass is -- the President is the COMMANDER IN CHIEF. He's the boss, he gets the last word. When he says it's time to go, the brass has NO CHOICE but to follow his orders.

End of discussion.

[guveqzero]

01:16 PM on 10/08/2010

A vote against Gates sounds like progress, never know though until the hard decisions need to be made.

[yankee011]

12:45 PM on 10/08/2010

You don't have to BE IN Afgahnistan for 1 minute to know it WILL NEVER WORK. Endless war is any easy read of the sitution, a little common sense is needed and if thats his position i'm all for him.

[kenhamlett]

12:14 PM on 10/08/2010

The Woodward interview with the President disclosed that his heart is no longer in the war in Afghanistan. Without even debating whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, we need to come home. Any time a President does not want to be at war, our troops should be on planes the following day. Nixon and Kissinger let the Vietnam War stagger to a horrible conclusion -- costing many thousands of American and Vietnamese lives -- well after they knew it was over. The President should not do that same thing. This new appointment seems also to signal that he is through with Afghanistan. If so, get the troops out of the line of fire now!

[pearlx2]

02:21 PM on 10/08/2010

Again, Bob Woodward is a LIAR. You cannot and should not believe a single word out of his mouth or his books. He has been caught in more than one lie.

[KenClay]

11:35 AM on 10/08/2010

Repeal DADT!