President Bush tapped Stephen J. Hadley ’69 to replace Condoleezza Rice as his national security advisor yesterday.
The news followed the announcement that Rice would succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state.
Powell announced his resignation shortly after the election. While Rice will need Senate approval for her switch, Hadley’s position does not require such legislative formalities.
One of Hadley’s former teachers, Walter LaFeber, the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor, history, said, “Stephen is a very intelligent person with lots of integrity who should be a wonderful national security advisor.”
Hadley has held various foreign policy positions in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and President Bush’s father, and most recently served as Bush’s deputy national security advisor.
Hadley boosted his White House credentials when he took the blame for an erroneous reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger that appeared in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Hadley went as far as to submit his resignation, but President Bush would not accept it.
Subsequent inquiry by the CIA found that the documents the reference was based upon had been forged.
The media-shy Hadley is expected to hold a lower profile than his former boss. The Cornell alumnus graduated from Yale Law School a year ahead of former President Clinton. He served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy under Vice President Cheney, then the secretary of defense, in the former President Bush’s administration.
In the 1980s, while taking a break from politics, he stayed in the District of Columbia working as a lawyer for a Washington law firm. He is married and has two children.
Archived article by Michael Margolis
Sun Senior Writer