There’s been a lot of buzz in the progosphere regarding dueling WaPo and NYT stories on James L. Jones, Obama’s National Security Advisor. Over the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of rumors going around that Jones wasn’t working out, that he couldn’t hold his own in meetings with the many large personalities in Obama’s national security team, that he wasn’t part of the inner circle. The two stories appear to be some sort of pushback from the White House — it certainly isn’t a coincidence that the Post and the Times both decided to run the same story on the same day.
In both pieces, Jones comes across as a fairly down-to-earth, sensible guy. WaPo:
In recent weeks, Jones has been portrayed in foreign policy articles and blogs as too measured and low-key to keep pace with the hard chargers working late hours in the West Wing. Some senior White House officials questioned early on whether Jones, 65, a retired four-star Marine general who barely knew Obama before the election, would succeed among younger staffers whose relationships with the president were forged during the long and arduous campaign. . . .
White House officials who cited early misgivings, more stylistic than substantive, insisted they have now disappeared. But Jones acknowledges that the road has not always been smooth, and he appears more comfortable than some of his administration colleagues in saying they still have some distance to travel.
It is “absolutely” fair to say that it has taken some time for him and his colleagues to get used to each other, Jones said in an interview Tuesday. “From this West Wing, in particular, because this is Obama Nation, right? True? This is where the Obama election campaign came, landed, en masse.”. . .
I’m not only an outsider, but I’m a 20-years-older-than-anybody-around outsider,” Jones said. “I’m a former general. And it took me a while to get the president to call me by my first name. Now, I’m ‘Hey, you,’ ” he said with a laugh. “But there is a generational thing here. There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to a certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.”. . .
In the White House, Jones said he has had to adjust to the relatively free flow of advice that Obama encourages. “When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the NSC to go with me,” he said. Now, he said, “I think the president and I are very comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be the shadow. I don’t have to be there all the time. I really have great people. I want them to be trusted.”
Jones said he is “not used to being in the center of these things. . . . But if I’m not living up to other people’s views of what the national security adviser should look like he’s doing . . . like my hair is on fire all the time,” so be it. “I did that in my life, a couple of generations ago, I was a gung ho major, and a gung-ho lieutenant colonel, and I sacrificed my family life for my career.”
If he can reform the NSC’s structure and process, he said, “then everybody can go home and have dinner with their families. Because they’ll have enough depth and robustness so that we can tee up issues — not constantly in a crisis mode.”
And here are excerpts from the Times story:
In an interview on Monday, General Jones responded that low profile did not necessarily mean low impact. “You can be a leader that takes charge of every meeting and takes charge of every issue and rides it to its conclusion and plays a very, very dominant role,” he said. “For me, that has the effect of muting voices that should be heard.” . . .
General Jones described that behind-the-scenes “teeing up” process as an example of how he could be helpful to the president. He maintained his cool even when asked about sniping from staff members that he went biking at lunchtime and left work early, although he did, at one point, seem about to crush his coffee cup.
“I’m here by 7 o’ clock in the morning, and I go home at 7, 7:30 at night; that’s a fairly reasonable day if you’re properly organized,” he said. What about officials who pride themselves on being at the White House deep into the night?
“Congratulations,” he said. “To me that means you’re not organized.”
Some of General Jones’s critics say that his practice of keeping a schedule separate from Mr. Obama’s suggests that the former four-star general and supreme commander of NATO “thinks like a principal” rather than as a member of the staff of the president of the United States.
But Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that General Jones was “a Marine, and he believes in team-building,” an approach that Mr. Holbrooke said had produced “a sophisticated, multilayer decision structure at the N.S.C. that did not exist before.”
I’ve quoted these at length for several reasons.
First, the NSC press aide who pulled off this coup deserves an award of some kind. The two reporters — Karen DeYoung at WaPo and Helene Cooper at NYT, both very very good journalists — were played. It’s not just that Jones’s answers are similar — even their questions are almost identical. This is a textbook example of the strengths of the White House’s message machine.
Second, much of the resulting blog commentary has expressed downright incredulity about Jones’s work ethic. TNR’s Michael Crowley:
But with all due respect to the general, isn’t that a better argument for not being national security advisor than for working short hours? The big bad world never sleeps, and coup plotters and terrorists generally don’t schedule their activities around eastern standard time sleep schedules, after all.
Spencer Ackerman:
You get the sense that Jones is readying the shuffleboard while longtime Obama aides Mark Lippert and Denis McDonough are plugging in the Metallica edition of Guitar Hero.
Ah, the hubris of the young and caffeinated. Only in Washington can a man who puts in twelve hour days (7 am to 7 pm, with time at lunch for excercise) be regarded as a slacker “working short hours.”
I respect and honor everyone who works for the President and puts in long hours. For some, it’s absolutely necessary — if, like Reggie Love, you’re the President’s body man, you’re not going home for dinner. But for many, it’s largely unnecessary. As Daniel Drezner wryly observes, the West Wing is not real life.
The frenetic twenty hours a day, seven days a week schedule kept by many young type A Presidential aides is the product of these folks’ desire to look like they’re willing to sacrifice their bodies, their families, and their health to the altar of the presidency. They want to be there so they are there, near the President, and thus will, at least in their own minds, be indispensible to him.
What people seem to forget is that the White House has a sit room, the State Department has an ops center, the CIA has an ops center, and dozens of other departments and agencies have similar operations, each of which is staffed 24/7 — but not by the same people all the time. Each agency has a regular rotation of staff, each set working eight hour shifts. And somehow, each and every one of them manages to do their job and get enough sleep.
You want to know what happens when people are crazy overworked? They get crazy tired. They get crazy brain-damaged. And they give the President crazy bad advice.
Does anyone seriously think a retired Marine general can’t handle the pace? Jones’s approach is exactly the right one: be there whenever he’s needed, delegate whenever possible, build his staff’s confidence in their own capabilities, and make sure he’s not completely worthless when the real crisis comes.
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