The man who argued for the Afghan troop surge and broke news of the Haiti earthquake to Obama talks to Lara Marlowein Washington
THE GROUND floor of the west wing of the White House is the nerve centre of American power, a bustling, windowless hive where presidential advisers stride down the central corridor and telephones never stop ringing. Desks are crowded into every open space and piled high with documents. There is little of the elegance one associates with the White House, only functional, government-issue furniture and an atmosphere of intense concentration.
Denis McDonough holds the titles of deputy national security adviser and chief of staff of the National Security Council (NSC). He works in a small office decorated with photographs of his children and their artwork. In the White House, what counts is not the size of the office, but proximity to the president.
During the presidential campaign, McDonough headed the 300-strong team of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers. He has, the New York Times says, “a deep familiarity with Mr Obama and his foreign policy thinking”.
McDonough told The Irish Times he considers it “a great blessing to work with Obama and for the American people”.
He describes the president as “a calm, determined leader” imbued with boundless intellectual curiosity. He says Obama is also “a pragmatic guy”: “As he said in Oslo, we’re going to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.”
Other Irish people serve in the White House: vice-president Joe Biden is a Finnegan on his mother’s side. Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan’s father came from Roscommon. Samantha Power, who covers international organisations at the NSC, was born in Cork.
But McDonough is doubtless the Irish-American closest to the president. And he is a personal friend of the Irish Ambassador to the US, Michael Collins.
McDonough is surprisingly fresh and energetic for a man who leaves home in Maryland at 5.30am every day, cycles to work, which he starts between 6am and 6.30am, and returns home “some time between 8pm and midnight”. Aged 40, he seems to personify the youth and relaxed attitude of the “no-drama Obama” White House.
McDonough’s 6ft 2in frame has made him one of the president’s favourite basketball partners. He accompanied the first family to Hawaii at Christmas, and broke news of the Haitian earthquake to Obama on January 12th, after which Obama dispatched him to the Caribbean island to direct communications on the US relief effort.
McDonough’s paternal grandparents emigrated from Galway. His mother’s parents were O’Mahonys from Cork.
“When my mom and dad got married, they lived in south Boston, which is where the first six of my brothers were born. After that they moved to Minnesota, which is where the other five of us were born. So there’s 11 of us.”
Two of his brothers became priests. There is “no question” that McDonough felt Irish when he was growing up. But what does it mean to be Irish in America? He pauses for an uncharacteristically long moment. “In a lot of ways, in the first instance it means being Catholic,” he says.
McDonough’s wife, Karin, is of Swedish and Norwegian origin. “She grew up in Beverly, which is on the south side of Chicago, arguably the most Irish neighbourhood in all of America.”
Though Karin came from a long line of Dutch Reformed ministers, “she’d tell you that, in a lot of ways, growing up in that neighbourhood, among the southside Irish as they called themselves, everybody was Catholic, something she kind of wished she were a part of”.
The McDonoughs have three children, Adeline, Liam and Teddy. Two were baptised Catholic, one as an Anglican. The family attends Catholic Mass and a Congregationalist church.
McDonough’s direct experience of Ireland has been limited to 10 days in 1991, when he was an exchange student in Spain, and a week in the spring of 2000 with his wife, when they lived in Germany. He has also stopped over in Shannon, both as a Senate aide and more recently with Obama. As for a real Obama visit to Ireland, the president “keeps saying that he would very much like to . . . He is eager to go.”
In 1996, McDonough did his special project for his master’s thesis at Georgetown University on the Troubles. “It was well into the Good Friday process and a very hopeful time,” he recalls.
He praises the Taoiseach, Gordon Brown and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton for their work on the February 5th devolution agreement. Regarding the subsequent bombing in Newry and murder in Derry, he says: “We have to make sure that we keep progress here and do not give the spoilers a chance.”
Throughout our half-hour conversation, McDonough repeatedly defers to Clinton and his boss, national security adviser Gen Jim Jones. He makes it clear that the US state department is in charge of Northern Ireland issues.
“Secretary Clinton did a great thing when she assumed the role of the envoy for herself. It underscores her commitment to it, and frankly it underscores the president’s commitment to it. They are in close touch on it.”
As Jones’s chief of staff, McDonough is responsible for managing 325 personnel on the NSC. “We co-ordinate all the national security policy for the administration, which includes $850 billion in expenditure yearly for national security issues.”
McDonough says he spends a lot of time “on a chief presidential priority, which is to communicate with the Muslim world”.
A White House photograph shows McDonough and Obama sitting together on Air Force One, conferring on Obama’s landmark Cairo speech on relations between the US and Islam.
Last autumn, McDonough argued for the “surge” of 30,000 additional troops for Afghanistan, which Obama announced on December 1st. “I provide my advice to him in private and I can tell you that there’s a lot of times when I provide advice that he ignores,” McDonough laughs modestly.
Late last year, McDonough accompanied Obama on a pre-dawn visit to Dover air force base, to receive the remains of Americans killed in Afghanistan. The Afghan war is “extraordinarily difficult, every day”, he says.
McDonough attacks every question in an analytical fashion, punctuating his answers with mental bullet points that he verbally numbers: one, two, three. He explains Afghanistan policy the way Obama does, almost verbatim. “The beauty of the policy review . . . was that with the president’s leadership, we fashioned together a policy that, one, advances the country’s interests in the war against al-Qaeda and, two, is durable because it has the buy-in of all the [cabinet] participants in the debate.”
Demonstrating “American values” helps to restore US standing in the world, McDonough says. “That is why we’ve been so appreciative of the Irish Government’s decision and the Irish people’s willingness” to take Guantanamo Bay transferees.
Obama “remains very committed to closing [the prison]”, he says, though he adds that “we’re not putting a timeline on this”.
Since the failed aircraft bombing on Christmas Day, Republicans have portrayed the Obama administration as “soft on terrorism”, though the president receives high ratings for his handling of the threat in polls.
“The American people have an expectation that you will keep them safe,” says McDonough.
“The president understands and takes that expectation very seriously. What we’re not going to do is stand up and brag about that fact. We do it every day. So we’ll just keep doing it . . . It’s the determined Irishman in me.”