Southwest alumni Jake Sullivan to Teach at Yale

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New York Times – June 21, 2014

Biden Adviser Leaving Washington, but It May Not Be for Long

By MARK LANDLER  

WASHINGTON — When Jake Sullivan leaves Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s staff in August to teach at Yale Law School this fall, he will join a familiar Washington subculture: the battle-scarred White House alumnus, desperate to sample a normal life before deciding whether to jump back into the maelstrom of the next political cycle.

In Mr. Sullivan’s case, it is not likely to be much of a choice. Before becoming Mr. Biden’s national security adviser in 2013, he was one of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s closest advisers, at her side in all 112 countries she visited as secretary of state. In an interview on Friday, Mrs. Clinton described Mr. Sullivan, 37, as a “coolheaded, clear-eyed analyst of the problems we faced with our national security.”

“He ended up being invaluable,” she said of Sullivan, whose sandy hair and skinny frame make him look barely his age, except when, as was often the case during the secretary’s Homeric travels, his eyes were darkly ringed after working all night.

If Mrs. Clinton runs for president in 2016, Mr. Sullivan is likely to play at least an advisory role in her campaign. In the premature Washington parlor game of who might serve in a Clinton White House, he is viewed as a potential national security adviser — all this before the White House has even announced his departure from the current administration.

“He’s the consummate insider,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, who ran the State Department’s policy planning office and recommended that Mr. Sullivan succeed her in 2011, making him the youngest director of policy planning in the department’s history.

Ms. Slaughter, now the president of the New America Foundation, likened Mr. Sullivan to Brent Scowcroft, the brainy, low-key Air Force general who learned at the hand of Henry A. Kissinger and was national security adviser to Gerald Ford and the elder George Bush.

Mr. Sullivan declined to comment for this article. But he is anything but shy or lacking in self-confidence. A graduate of Yale Law School who clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, he likes to dismiss flimsy arguments by saying they are not “dispositive.”

Speaking to graduates of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the Uni-versity of Minnesota last year, he quoted Bob Dylan on the virtues of young people speaking out of turn. “It can feel like arrogance to say, ‘I have an idea,’ or ‘I can do that’— especially if you’re surrounded by smart and exper-ienced people,” he said. “But that’s not arrogance; it’s being constructive.”  

Still, Mr. Sullivan would have labored in relative obscurity, if not for his role in secret negotiations with Iran.   In July 2012, he quietly dropped off a trip in Paris when Mrs. Clinton sent him to Oman to meet Iranian officials to explore whether there was scope for a nuclear deal.

“It was unusual because he didn’t have the high profile and years of experience that others had who could have been sent,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But he had my full confidence, and he was still low-enough profile that he could travel back and forth without inciting undue interest.”

Those first talks went nowhere, but in later meetings, Mr. Sullivan, joined by a more senior but similarly soft-spoken diplomat, William J. Burns, laid the groundwork for the interim nuclear deal that Iran signed with the West in Geneva last November.

What sets Mr. Sullivan apart in a town full of smart, driven young people who impress their elders is how he has shuttled between the political worlds of Clinton and Obama — and did so without getting a rap as a careerist or an opportunist.

Jake Sullivan plans to teach at Yale Law School, but he is already being seen as a potential national security adviser in a Hillary Rodham Clinton administration.                                                                  

In 2008, he jumped from Mrs. Clinton’s vanquished primary campaign to prepare President Obama for his debates with Senator John McCain. After four years in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, Mr. Sullivan was weighing a return to his native Minnesota and a political career. But aides to Mr. Obama were determined to bring him into the West Wing.

To get Mr. Sullivan face time with the president, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, recalled setting up a lunch on a trip to Myanmar, during which Mr. Obama turned unexpectedly to Mr. Sullivan and asked him for a quick history of the country.

The job of national security adviser to Mr. Biden was an odd fit, given the potential for future rivalry between Mr. Sullivan’s old boss and a vice president who has not ruled out his own run for the White House. But it was the only senior national security job open, and Mr. Obama called Mr. Sullivan from Air Force One to lean on him to take it.

Mr. Biden, his aides say, has never been troubled by Mr. Sullivan’s ties to Mrs. Clinton. But as a potential Clinton campaign draws closer, avoiding a conflict of interest was bound to get trickier. Mr. Sullivan, for example, reviewed chapters of Mrs. Clinton’s new book, “Hard Choices,” while doing his day job for the vice president.

In a statement, Mr. Biden praised Mr. Sullivan for his “clear, incisive, and creative thinking,” adding, “if I have anything to do with it, he will be back in government sooner rather than later.”  Should Mrs. Clinton become president, it is hard to imagine she would not want Mr. Sullivan to return to work with her. “I’ve never in 12 years seen her rely on anyone like I’ve seen her rely on him” for policy, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser who worked with Mr. Sullivan at the State Department.

Friends of Mr. Sullivan predict he will resist the pull of another campaign. He got a taste of the furies to come when his name surfaced on emails about the administration’s talking points after the Benghazi attack.

A bigger disincentive is his girlfriend, Maggie Goodlander, who is a second-year law student at Yale and the main reason for his move to New Haven. The couple met at a security conference in Munich, when she was working for former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

But there is at least one threat to Mr. Sullivan’s plans. He has agreed to stay on with the administration until July 20, the deadline for reaching a final nuclear deal with Iran. If that deadline slips, as many officials expect, he might have to delay his plans to conduct a last round of diplomacy.