For most of 2014, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough oversaw a stealthy effort to prod Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel into accelerating the release of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay—one of Barack Obama’s most conspicuously unfulfilled campaign promises.
But the secretary had dragged his feet through months of meetings, reflecting a growing unease among the Pentagon brass. Finally, after an otherwise uneventful Cabinet meeting that summer, Obama turned to confront Hagel sitting in the chair next to him.
“I don’t think you are moving fast enough, Chuck,” said Obama, by then a second-term commander in chief grown accustomed to having his orders executed, not questioned.
“I was giving floor speeches calling for the closing of Gitmo before you were even in the Senate, Mr. President,” the former Republican senator from Nebraska shot back, according to two people familiar with the details of the interaction.
Then he really pushed it: “Mr. President, maybe you need a new defense secretary.”
Obama, who had already been growing dissatisfied with Hagel on a number of fronts, flashed an angry smile and gestured to McDonough, who was watching the encounter from across the polished table. “Denis,” he said curtly, “you get together with Chuck and fix this.”
They never quite did. And a few months later, Hagel was gone, summoning McDonough to the Pentagon to personally receive his resignation letter.
***
Denis Richard McDonough, a Minnesota native with the rangy build of a defensive back and the ashen asceticism of a 16th-century Vatican fixer, is Obama’s fifth, favorite, and likely last chief of staff.
More perfectly than perhaps anyone else who has served in the Obama White House, McDonough mirrors the president’s deepest priorities—discipline, loyalty, dogged efficiency and obsession over process—in a way that Obama pined for, but never quite found, in his previous chiefs. He’s intensely focused on the two troubled areas Obama in twilight is most concerned with—restoring a working relationship with Congress and dealing with an increasingly unpredictable national security situation. And, as many who have crossed Obama have found out, McDonough is more than willing to tell anyone who gets in their way to go to hell, in words profane or polite.
“The person Denis reminds me most of? Barack Obama,” says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. “Just between us,” she adds with a laugh and stage whisper, “he is courteous, he is a gentleman, but when we get into a discussion, you know, his voice changes—but the gentleman is still there. ... He really seems to be an extension of the president. And like the president, Denis is not confrontational until, well, he is.”
How a relatively obscure staffer’s staffer like McDonough, who signed up to serve when Obama was just a cocky first-term senator, ended up with what’s often described as the second-most powerful job in Washington is testament to McDonough’s nearly superhuman capacity for hard work. But it says even more about Obama—and the circled-wagons nature of second-term presidencies—that he has chosen to vest his trust in an aide whose power is almost entirely derivative of his own.
There are even more powerful ties that bind the two. McDonough’s career, like Obama’s, was defined by the Iraq War debacle. In McDonough’s case, it was a personally searing experience: As a young Senate aide, he had a hand in putting together the resolution authorizing the 2003 invasion, written in a fever and largely without outside input. It turned him into a dove with brass knuckles—and an even better fit with Obama, who throughout his presidency has resisted efforts to engage more militarily in Syria and other unraveling places.
Despite his outsized role within the administration, he remains strikingly unknown outside the cramped White House quarters where he spends 12-plus hours a day, five to seven days a week; he is, by all accounts of the more than two dozen current and former Obama administration advisers I spoke with, a talented broker who views his primary role as carrying out, not challenging, the boss’s decisions—and a first-class control freak.
“We’re tough guys with low egos,” says John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff and Obama’s White House counselor before becoming Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. “We’re both sweat-the-details guys. … He doesn’t substitute his views for that of other advisers. He views his role as giving the president the best information available and then executing.” Another top Obama aide summed it up more succinctly: “Denis,” the aide told me, “is a soldier [who] follows orders.”
Which is very much how the boss wants it. Obama has now had more chiefs of staff than any other president since the role was first occupied six decades ago—five to previous record-holders Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s four. Obama’s first, and most influential, was Rahm Emanuel, who oversaw a hyperproductive first two years before departing to become Chicago’s mayor—a parting Obama wasn’t especially sorry to see happen, according to current and former aides.
After Emanuel’s exit, Obama cycled through three more chiefs in the space of three years. First came Pete Rouse, an avuncular wise man thrust briefly into the spotlight but never considered a long-term solution. Then, a full-blown disaster—Bill Daley, another Chicagoan and former Cabinet secretary under Clinton whose conflict-filled tenure roiled the West Wing for what Obama still views as something of a lost year. After that came Jack Lew, a technocratic ex-budget chief who held down the empty fort during the president’s 2012 reelection campaign; he was beloved by Obama but regarded externally as a less-than-dynamic presence. Then there was McDonough. If Lew exuded calm, their colleagues say, McDonough enforces it.
His 2013 appointment was the culmination of Obama’s quest to replicate the No Drama atmosphere of his first campaign in a building that breeds internal conflict—the installation of a manager who could impose “peace, quiet and order,” in the words of one top former adviser. “Process protects you,” is a favorite McDonough aphorism.
But many of his confidants worry that the harmony has come at the expense of the energy and creativity that led to the president’s greatest successes. “It seems kind of funny, in retrospect, that we had a reputation for being insular,” one of Obama’s senior first-term advisers told me. “It’s much tighter now. Denis really controls access.”
Obama explained his connection to McDonough—a fellow jock who used to pedal his bike to work until he had an accident and his wife made him stop—during a GQ interview with Bill Simmons last November. “The principle of team building in the White House is really no different than the principle of team building anywhere, on a sports team or a well-run business,” he said. “Do they put team ahead of themselves?”
The problem, according to some of his associates, is that McDonough’s vision of being a team player too often entails his playing all the positions himself. While current and former West Wingers I spoke with praised him as a firm-handed manager who has imposed some military-like rigor on a sloppy, uncoordinated bureaucracy, McDonough’s hawkishness about enforcing “process” has translated in practice into a White House where he carefully controls the flow of paper and people to the president, browbeating aides who blindside him and micromanaging to the point of exhaustion—his own, and that of his aides.
After a miserable first year on the job, McDonough has overseen a team basking in two years of success, with fourth-quarter wins on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the Iran nuclear deal and the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba. But his attention can border on the obsessive—he spends hours on tasks previous chiefs have delegated, like poring over the manifests of congressional meetings with the president, the precise time of day Obama is assigned to make phone calls or the list of passengers on Air Force One. (A White House official close to McDonough said his control-freak tendencies are overplayed.)
In any event, an orderly internal process is no bulwark against a violent, disorderly world—and many people I spoke with outside the administration now wonder whether McDonough’s hold has been too tight, pinching the wide-ranging debate needed to allow Obama to face the new threats posed by ISIL and the unraveling Middle East abroad and the threat of terrorism and economic uncertainty at home.
“There is a ton of fatigue. I think Denis is tired, too, but it’s the team the president wants,” says a former high-ranking member of the administration’s foreign policy team. “He values people he knows, people who understand his worldview. He’s looking for people to implement, not debate. After Paris and San Bernardino we need a debate.”
***
There is something stubbornly retro about McDonough, as if he time-traveled to the present from the halftime of a 1950s high school football game in suburban Minnesota. It’s fitting that this liberal Democrat, who lives with his wife and three kids in the uber-progressive enclave of Takoma Park, Maryland, cites Dwight Eisenhower as his role model for running an orderly show.
McDonough is only 46, but he projects a silver-templed formality from an earlier age and peppers his Midwest twang with Irish archaisms. His small talk almost always centers on sports or the doings of his children, and that, too, makes perfect sense when you learn he grew up the ninth of 11 brothers and sisters in a high-achieving and deeply religious family (two of his brothers went on to become priests). Like Obama—and many of the males in the West Wing—he’s a fitness freak and obsessed with keeping his weight under 200 pounds; in his case, it’s motivated by a touch of anxiety—the men in his family tend to die young, and his father survived a serious heart attack at age 50 to live into his 70s.
But his Minnesota nice has an edge, and his small-town demeanor is cut with a touch of Boston tough, the product of his parents’ childhood in working-class Dorchester.
In Washington, McDonough is known for his hair-trigger temper (a favorite description for people he doesn’t like is “rat-fucker”) and over the years, Obama and other senior staffers have made a point of telling him to cool it. But his instinct is also to keep relationships from deteriorating to the breaking point. When I ran into McDonough at a holiday party in 2013, he confronted me about a story on Obama’s Cabinet I’d written for this magazine—and anger flashed in his eyes as he told me how much I’d “gotten wrong.” But when I asked him for specifics, he smiled, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Not tonight! Have fun. This isn’t a busman’s holiday.” (I had to Google that one: an old expression for working on your vacation.) When the article won an award, he sent a chipper note on embossed White House stationary: “Way to go!”
That throwback mentality extends to his vision of the chief of staff job, too, and he’s made clear to friends and staff that his ideas about the role as a relatively nonideological gatekeeper also come from the I-like-Ike era.
As with many postwar institutions, the origins of the White House chief of staff job are military. Eisenhower created the post in 1953 to replicate the regimented structure of his European command during World War II. He tapped Sherman Adams, a formidable former New Hampshire congressman, who imposed tight control over the president’s paper flow—and even tighter control over the Oval Office visitor log. At his peak, before a scandal over kickbacks and a vicuña coat toppled him, Adams was so powerful Democrats joked, “What if Adams should die and Eisenhower becomes president of the United States?”
Despite the ever-increasing demands on the office of the president, Eisenhower’s Democratic successors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, ditched the chief of staff position, preferring a more informal structure with a rotating cast of power players, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who exercised chief-like authority in his brother’s White House. “As a president, you need a good organization, and that’s been a challenge for Democrats,” says Martha Joynt Kumar, a historian who has spent recent years embedded with the daily press in the West Wing.
Richard Nixon, who came of age in Ike’s shadow, reinstated the chief of staff and centralized power in the office—then tapped for the job a yes-man who wouldn’t challenge him: crew-cut future Watergate conspirator H.R. Haldeman. Even after Nixon’s excesses, Gerald Ford retained and strengthened the post. Recognizing his own vulnerabilities and lack of executive experience, Ford hired the domineering Donald Rumsfeld, the first chief who was publicly criticized for being too powerful and trying to outshine the boss. “When Rumsfeld was chief of staff, there was a perception that he was too aggressive in promoting interests that … weren’t the interests of Ford,” says University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus, who specializes in White House staffing. “Administrations tend to see this pretty quickly and go for someone more effective.” Sure enough, Rumsfeld was reassigned to the Pentagon after barely a year.
The consensus among historians and former West Wingers is that Reagan’s first chief of staff, James Baker III, was probably the most effective official ever to hold the job, combining a willingness to delegate with an intuitive knack for channeling Reagan’s brilliant but opaque political instincts.
McDonough, in particular, is an admirer and says the best advice he ever got was from Baker, who told him to emphasize the “staff” part over the “chief” part in his title.
***
Barack Obama came to office as the first president since JFK who had no significant executive or legislative leadership experience before winning the White House. He masked it well, but he was deeply insecure about his ability to master the complexities of the job after being elected, and that immediately made him more dependent on his chiefs of staff to provide structure and direction for his administration.
In the days following Obama’s 2008 victory, Pete Rouse, a trusted mentor often tasked with drafting organizational memos, offered the president-elect two divergent options. The first was a weak chief model, à la the free-form organization favored by Bill Clinton, with a diffuse chain of command that made the president the direct supervisor of a dozen top officials. Obama—reading Rouse’s memo on a post-election flight to Hawaii—endorsed Rouse’s second proposal, a strong-chief system in which almost all authority flowed through the office.
Obama briefly considered tapping McDonough’s old boss, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, for the job, but decided he was too laid back for the fights that loomed—and told confidants that Daschle, a longtime ally, would make an ideal second chief. Obama message guru David Axelrod, who wielded enormous influence at the time, strongly backed his friend Emanuel, a fiery tactician who had engineered the Democratic take-back of the House two years earlier. At first Emanuel—who had designs on becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House—demurred, but he was the ideal candidate for a job that entailed ramming Obama’s hugely ambitious massive legislative agenda through a Democratic-controlled Congress.
Obama and Emanuel knew and liked each other, but despite reports to the contrary, they weren’t personally close, then or now. Yet few presidents have ever leaned so heavily on a chief of staff as Obama did on Emanuel during the whirlwind start of his presidency. In turn, Emanuel rewarded the president by hammering through the massive stimulus bill and then the Affordable Care Act, a wrenching process that would eventually drive a wedge between the two men.
The critical difference between the White House under Emanuel and McDonough, people who have worked for both tell me, is that Emanuel was merely one in a swarm of domineering first-term players—and McDonough today has fewer peers. Besides, it’s his nature to grab a task himself rather than risk the possibility of it being half-done (a favorite expression to aides presenting substandard action plans is an incredulous, “You want me to bring this to the president?”).
Despite his well-earned reputation as a profane in-your-face micromanager (he kept a GPS-like system next to his desk that tracked Obama’s movements around the West Wing), Emanuel had much less control than McDonough does now. Moreover, he had come of age in the freewheeling Clinton White House and knew he couldn’t block Axelrod, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs or his nemesis, Obama’s Chicago friend and mentor Valerie Jarrett, from influencing the president. Indeed, one of Emanuel’s most enduring managerial decisions was to convene a “senior advisers” meeting every day, during which six to 10 of Obama’s top aides, scattered around the Oval Office on couches and wingbacks, would discuss strategy and day-to-day tactics with the president.
Emanuel’s preeminence wasn’t destined to last. As his reign rolled on—it would become increasingly defined by the growing GOP backlash against the administration’s legislative victories—Obama’s dissatisfaction grew. Emanuel had never fully supported Obama’s decision to plow ahead with health care reform in late 2009 (he thought it would rapidly dissipate political capital better spent on potential bipartisan immigration and climate deals—and argued for a much smaller bill) and Obama suspected he was still grousing to his buddies about having been overruled in the national press corps.
Moreover, Emanuel’s endearingly abrasive personality was becoming less endearing by the day. Many of his truly profane outbursts were for dramatic effect, but he displayed a real mean streak (“He can’t stand weakness, and if you showed weakness—pfffft,” a friend of his told me) and had a nasty habit of singling out one or two midlevel aides during morning staff meetings for public humiliation.
But there was also a larger dynamic at play: By mid-2010, having braved the worst of the Great Recession, Obama was shedding the training wheels, outgrowing Emanuel even as his chief of staff wasn’t shy about expressing his anger about some decisions the president endorsed, like Attorney General Eric Holder’s ill-fated effort to hold the trial of 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City.
The tensions came to a head in early 2010. Emanuel was facing a backlash from liberals who felt he was trying to derail Obama’s progressive agenda. In response, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank published a defense of the chief that struck many in the West Wing as a ham-handed Emanuel-led public relations campaign. One Milbank line rankled Obama’s top advisers in particular: “Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating.”
For all the strife, Emanuel would serve just under two years, about average for previous occupants of the job, and his parting seemed to break the tension that had grown between the two men. In October 2010, Emanuel choked back tears during an emotional East Room sendoff that seemed to remind both men of what they liked about each other in the first place. “It’s fair to say that we could not have accomplished what we’ve accomplished without Rahm’s leadership,” Obama said before hugging his outgoing chief.
Emanuel, it turned out, got out while the getting was good. A month after his departure, Tea Party-powered Republicans would retake the House majority he had worked so hard to win four years earlier. Obama had months to prepare for Emanuel’s departure, but he was preoccupied with cutting a lame-duck budget deal and tapped Rouse as an interim replacement.
If Rouse’s three-and-half-month tenure was uneventful, what followed next would have farther-reaching consequences. Obama, again at Axelrod’s urging, tapped another well-known Chicagoan for the job, former Clinton Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, in January 2011.
It turned out to be a match made south of heaven: Daley was an outsider who had worked in the financial services sector and whose father and brother had been legendary mayors of Chicago for decades, and he had the expectation that his office conferred instant authority. Nothing could have been further from the truth: To Daley’s annoyance, Obama had undercut him from the start by selecting his deputies—and rejecting Daley’s handpicked team.
Daley, who had a reputation as an easygoing relationship-builder with connections to Hill Republicans, soon turned sour in the corner office. He thought the White House atmosphere remained too loose and campaign-like—that low-level aides had too much access to Obama—and his morning staff meetings often turned into paint-peeling diatribes, according to several former staffers. This was jarring for the tight-knit—and largely under 40—Obama team, which had come through a miracle campaign and the Emanuel era together and viewed itself as something of a self-protecting unit.
Even as Daley was alienating his staff, Obama was marginalizing him from the bipartisan budget negotiations he was personally conducting with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill. Daley had intended to stay for two years, but he left after only a year—and not before delivering an expletive-laced interview to Politico’s Roger Simon in which he joked that Emanuel was “leaker-in-chief” and that Obama’s first three years in office had been “brutal.”
The sense of relief in the West Wing was palpable when Obama picked Lew, a former State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton and an Obama budget chief, for the job. Lew was a stay-in-your-lane manager—an important attribute at a time when the dominant player in the White House was 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe, who had returned to the administration to shepherd Obama through a grinding 2012 reelection season.
“Jack was really a transitional figure who Obama wanted to make permanent for the sake of not rocking the boat,” says one former West Wing aide.
***
No single official has risen as methodically through the greased-pole Obama ranks as McDonough.
After graduating from Minnesota’s St. John’s University and earning a master’s degree from Georgetown’s foreign-service school, McDonough took a succession of not very glamorous Hill staffer jobs, culminating in a senior foreign policy role working for Daschle in the Senate. When Daschle was defeated in 2004, McDonough ground through a couple of Hill and think-tank gigs before jumping to Obama’s staff with Rouse, his old Daschle-land boss. Obama liked McDonough’s brisk, problem-solving style—it meshed with his own—and McDonough leaped at the chance to join Obama’s campaign, where he earned a reputation for his volcanic temper and dray-horse work ethic.
Dan Pfeiffer, who would serve as Obama’s communications director in the White House, remembers his friend McDonough driving out to Iowa on weekends during the winter of 2007—after working a week of 14-hour days at Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters as one of the campaign’s senior policy advisers. “Denis would go out there and shovel out people’s driveways, and go door to door [for Obama],” says Pfeiffer, who left the administration last year after an exhausting six-plus years in the West Wing. “He would own whole neighborhoods.”
Another Obama ’08 staffer, echoing the recollections of several other people I interviewed, remembered thinking McDonough was like no one he had ever met—a combustible and charming mixture of brains, ambition, Catholic piety and relentless competitiveness, all bound together by an abiding sense of responsibility to Obama and anxiety about letting down the team. When Hillary Clinton attacked Obama for his “naive” vow to meet with hostile world leaders as president, the shaken candidate buttonholed McDonough to ask whether he should walk the statement back. “No,” was his advice, and Obama stuck with it.
It was McDonough who organized Obama’s high-stakes overseas campaign trip in July 2008—and one staffer I spoke with vividly recalled sitting in Obama’s Chicago headquarters, watching a nervous McDonough pace back and forth in his Birkenstocks, praying over his rosary, eyes shut, that the trip would go well.
It did, and McDonough soon brought the same level of intensity to a succession of top jobs at the National Security Council, where he has since played a central planning role in nearly every major decision of Obama’s presidency, from the drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq to rolling back the military ban on gays to monitoring the activity of all the agencies involved in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
He also turned out to have a singular talent for navigating treacherous White House office politics. When Obama’s ineffective initial national security adviser, former Marine Corps General Jim Jones, fell badly out of favor during Obama’s first year in office, McDonough managed to avoid the fallout—and became Obama’s go-to guy outside the chain of command.
Jones’ chief of staff at the time was Obama favorite Mark Lippert—a young rising star on the Senate staff who had recommended McDonough for the campaign job in the first place after Lippert returned to active duty as a commissioned reservist in the Navy. But he didn’t fare so well. Though they were friends, many saw Lippert and McDonough as rivals for Obama’s attention; the jockeying was resolved in McDonough’s favor when Lippert resigned less than a year into the administration after Jones accused him of leaking unflattering details to the news media.
McDonough then replaced Lippert, and when Jones was sacked in the fall of 2010 in favor of Tom Donilon, McDonough was promoted again—to the NSC’s No. 2 post. Inside the White House, in fact, McDonough often overshadowed Donilon, in no small part because Obama personally trusted him more—a residual benefit from their shoulder-to-shoulder work on the campaign, people who worked on the team told me.
The president was also philosophically in tune with McDonough. Both men were allergic to military intervention—and McDonough was an enthusiastic executor of Obama’s plan for running foreign policy: concentrating as much decision-making power in the West Wing national security staff as possible, at the expense of the harder-to-control Defense and State departments.
This aggravated the big-time principals Obama had recruited to run those departments. In his post-Washington memoir, Obama’s former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta (himself a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton) casts McDonough and the rest of Obama’s team as a bunch of control freaks who imposed a more-or-less blanket prohibition on speeches or media appearances. Panetta had been given fair warning: His predecessor Bob Gates pulled him aside as he was packing up and told him, “The biggest pain in the ass you are going to deal with is that NSC crowd,” according to another former Cabinet secretary Panetta talked to at the time.
For most of 2011 and 2012, it was conventional White House wisdom that McDonough would replace Donilon if Obama won—until the September 11, 2012, debacle at a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi scrambled those plans. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the president’s first choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, botched a Sunday show appearance about the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and was given the NSC as a consolation prize after Senate Republicans vowed to block her confirmation to State. McDonough had always been on the short list for the chief of staff position, but he quickly leapfrogged the only other serious candidate, Ron Klain, a longtime adviser to Vice President Joe Biden whom, several sources told me, Obama never fully trusted.
But the unexpected staff shuffle left new conflicts in its wake, and once Rice landed the job, tensions were inevitable between the hyper-organized, action-oriented McDonough and Rice, who favored lengthy policy discussions over goal-oriented planning sessions. McDonough also had a familial attachment to the members of the NSC staff after an entire four-year presidential term with them—and viewed Rice as an outsider who didn’t fully appreciate its institutional values, according to several current and former administration officials.
He and Rice battled over a number of issues behind closed doors, associates of both told me, and there have been plenty of expletive-laden run-ins between the two strong-willed advisers.
Tensions, I’m told, have remained a constant, and Rice is often a target of anonymous criticism from other administration officials, who complain about her penchant for running marathon, very un-McDonough-like policy meetings without a series of get-it-done takeaways. Secretary of State John Kerry is now said to be dodging NSC meetings whenever he can, and at one point Hagel, who was quickly losing patience with the whole Obama crew, simply stood up and left in the middle of an especially tedious meeting late in his tenure, announcing, “I’ll give you two hours, Susan, but I’m not going to sit through four hours of this bullshit.”
***
Since he took over as chief of staff in early 2013, McDonough has accrued power to an extent that not even Rouse, who drafted the strong-chief memo, could have envisioned. With all of the first-term heavyweights gone, the daily senior advisers’ meetings at which the serious business of the Obama White House often got done are now held only sporadically at best.
Many of those closest to Obama still have Oval Office walk-in privileges. Yet instead of arguing out their positions in front of the president, most senior West Wing aides have taken to making their case before McDonough in his capacious office in the southwest corner of the building—at an expanded Cabinet Room-style table he had brought in for that purpose.
Now, the most critical meeting of the day has only two players: McDonough and the president himself. They call it the afternoon “wrap,” and it often takes place during long, hands-in-pocket strolls the two love to take around the White House grounds. (Sometimes McDonough invites select advisers to join before breaking off for his one-on-one with Obama.) In fact, the moment that will likely define McDonough’s tenure took place during just such a walk, in August 2013, when Obama was debating airstrikes on Syria in response to President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians. Most observers expected him to launch the strikes—until he came back from the walk, that is.
Then, Obama surprised nearly everyone by deciding to force a vote in Congress on whether to do so, effectively putting the military action on hold.
He and McDonough had made the call alone, and the president informed Kerry, Rice and Hagel of his decision only after the fact. “They were not in the Oval, that is correct,” McDonough told me a few weeks later. To people inside the building, the takeaway was clear: McDonough wasn’t just Obama’s chief of staff, he was still the top national security aide and confidant on the toughest decisions.
But there have been hints that Obama’s confidence is not infinite. Following the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act in late 2013, an irritated Obama called in the cavalry—in this case, Podesta, whose portfolio technically involved overseeing development of executive orders on climate change, a presidential priority, so McDonough could focus most of his attention on more pressing issues. In truth, Obama wanted a more experienced wise man to help him get out of a rut, and Podesta was soon sitting next to McDonough, who had briefly worked for Podesta at the liberal Center for American Progress, at morning meetings.
He also spent a lot more time cultivating a team that was showing serious signs of late-in-the-game fatigue. While still instinctively driven to push his staff as hard as he can, McDonough also plays pickup hoops on the court behind the Oval Office with staffers, invites aides’ families to the South Lawn to watch Air Force flyovers and hosts brown bag lunches in his office to elicit input from lower-level advisers. He even blasts out a staff email every time he heads over to Starbucks—and a few regulars make the trek with him. (“It’s like, ‘Hey guys, you want me to pick you up coffee while I’m out?’” says a colleague. “I don’t think he gets a lot of takers. Yeah, just try to picture the chief of staff to the president of the United States walking back with 40 cups of coffee.”)
For all of his pull inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, McDonough has had far less success controlling forces outside the White House as the president’s influence fades in the homestretch. His experience with the congressional portfolio is a case in point. From his earliest days, the former Hill staffer made a point of trying to improve Obama’s famously bad relations with key members of Congress, and leaders on both sides of the aisle give him an A for effort and also praised his congressional liaison, Katie Beirne Fallon. Pelosi says he’s “terrific … he makes things happen.” Mike Sommers, chief of staff for recently retired Republican Speaker John Boehner, told me that McDonough has been a much better bargaining partner than the poker-faced Lew. “During the big negotiations, it was always the staff that caused the problems,” Sommers says. “Denis really changed all that.”
But McDonough has had a far tougher time in the Senate, where he began his career, and clashed frequently with members of his own party disappointed by Obama snubs and half-fulfilled promises. In his self-appointed role as guardian of the national security establishment, he sparred for months in 2014 with then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her staff over a much-anticipated report on Bush-era torture practices by the CIA.
Over four months that summer, to the astonishment of Senate staff, McDonough sat through a series of two- to four-hour meetings in a secure room in the Hart Senate Office Building without access to his phone or email, litigating details in Feinstein’s draft report. (“The president’s chief of staff didn’t have anything better to do with his time?” one Democratic aide involved in the process said.)
Feinstein and her staff suspected that McDonough, a former college safety, was playing out the clock: The White House already knew Democrats would lose the Senate, and Republicans wanted to quash the report altogether, so time was on their side. Eager to break the impasse, Feinstein winnowed her request down to 14 aliases for agency staff she wanted to include in the final document—and McDonough, politely but firmly, rejected it. “Denis, we can’t tell this story if we black out the names of everybody. … This really matters,” she implored him.
But he had made up his mind: In a classic McDonough gesture, he flew out to meet with Feinstein at her house in San Francisco, to offer a calm and respectful explanation—but didn’t budge on the particulars.
His battles with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s chief of staff, the equally self-assured former telecom executive David Krone, were far more ferocious. Things got off to a bad start in mid-2013, when McDonough confronted Krone in the lobby of Reid’s office suite over several bills Obama wanted brought to the floor quickly (“You never have our back!” he complained). Krone responded angrily, accusing McDonough of refusing to act on Reid’s request that Hill staffers be exempt from having to register with Obamacare health exchanges.
The two men began shouting “Fuck you!” at each other at high volume in front of passersby—the 6-foot 3-inch McDonough craning down to go nose-to-nose with the shorter Krone. Rob Nabors, a McDonough deputy chief of staff, grabbed both men and quickly escorted them into a side room, according to a person who witnessed the exchange.
Things went downhill from there. Obama and McDonough both suspected Krone of leaking details of budget negotiations to reporters, while Reid and his equally volatile chief accused Obama’s team of caving to Republicans on budget deals—and doing nothing to help endangered Senate Democrats in the 2014 midterms.
The two men tried sorting out their differences during a Saturday meeting at a Starbucks several blocks from the White House, where Krone reiterated his request that Obama step up his fundraising for a Reid-controlled super PAC to support some of Reid’s embattled members. McDonough was noncommittal—Obama detests super PACs and his lawyers put crippling restrictions on his participation in events. So a ticked-off Reid took up the matter with Obama personally, calling him up to say, “The only conclusion we can reach is you prefer not to do anything with the super PAC,” according to a person who was given a readout of the call.
McDonough eventually brokered a compromise: Obama did two super PAC events, added a few fundraisers to his schedule and asked the Democratic National Committee to take out a modest $5 million loan to aid Reid’s cause. Reid wasn’t happy with the result, but at least could exercise a prerogative few power players can: direct access to Obama without McDonough as an intermediary.
At times, Obama seems to enjoy a little independence from his own sentry. In 2013, Reid used his open channel to float a proposal—not made public until now—that stunned Obama and his staff. Congress had just passed a funding bill for the joint Pentagon-Israel Iron Dome missile system when Reid fielded a phone call from Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas multibillionaire and GOP donor. Adelson made an offer: He would personally finance $1 billion for Iron Dome batteries, paid through the federal government, so committed was he to safeguarding the Jewish state.
“I’ll call the president right away,” an excited Reid told him, according to people with knowledge of the interaction.
Obama was thrown off his guard momentarily—“What?!” he asked Reid. When the president regained his footing, he told the leader to thank Adelson but that he didn’t think private financing of munitions would set a good precedent, and didn’t feel the need to loop McDonough into the decision-making process. The idea died.
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The irony of McDonough’s success is that, given his druthers, Obama would have kept Lew as chief until the end of his term. The bespectacled former hedge fund manager gave him no choice. With the champagne bottles of the 2012 reelection party still in the recycling bin, Lew threatened to return to his native New York if Obama didn’t appoint him to his dream job: Treasury secretary.
Obama didn’t know whom he wanted to replace Lew—but he knew what he wanted in a replacement. The president, whose disdain for over-the-horizon administrative planning has long been a gripe of advisers who begged him to play a longer game, informally sketched out the job requirements to one Oval Office visitor at the time. It represented a significant change from Emanuel’s free-range days, reflecting the evolution of Obama’s self-image from first-term novice to second-term master.
“Look, at this point, I’m pretty confident that I know how to do this job,” he said. “What I want is someone who can implement things, keep things running smoothly. I want somebody who can run a team.”
More pointedly, Obama was telling people he wanted to end his presidency as the lowest-drama Obama he could possibly be, that he didn’t want, as he put it, “another Rahm.”
When McDonough interviewed with Obama for the job, his vision of the office tracked exactly with Obama’s, tilted toward national security. He told the president that he didn’t want to advise him on domestic policy—that had been a specialty of the four previous chiefs—but that he wanted to give Obama a “square” accounting of alternatives without thumbing the scale.
In the past two years that has worked well, with Obama scoring a series of domestic policy wins. But that all changed after the attacks in Paris and California, and the Obama-McDonough team now confronts its biggest challenge to date, in the impossible-to-control policy area where McDonough exercises the greatest influence on the president.
Republicans have hammered Obama as weak and indecisive for not significantly escalating military action against the metastasizing threat from the Islamic State, and at times the president has responded too slowly, in the view of many fellow Democrats. Several former Obama aides told me they think it’s time to refresh an overworked and tired national security team, to bring in fresh blood.
Yet apart from the appointment of a new ISIL adviser and a high-profile visit to the Pentagon to discuss strategy, Obama and his chief of staff seem committed to not changing much of anything—even if it means denting the Obama legacy they have spent so much time burnishing.
For his part, McDonough seems willing to absorb the punishment. (Another favorite expression of his, borrowed from Mike Tyson, is “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth.”) Unless the boss decides to change course. McDonough, a loyalist to the end, knows his role. And besides, his instincts and Obama’s are one and the same. That could make for one tough final year of external shocks, at a time when Obama has finally gotten the West Wing he always wanted.
On a recent trip to Capitol Hill, McDonough was asked, “How’s life treating you?”
A reporter in earshot caught his response: “Like a baby treats a diaper, man.”