WASHINGTON -- Stephen Hadley would prefer that you not read this article, even though it contains little scandalous dirt about him or his boss, the president of the United States.

The low-key lawyer from South Euclid, Ohio, spent the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency as a deputy to international relations guru Condoleezza Rice, happy to remain in the national security adviser's shadow. Foreign-affairs cognoscenti knew he had President Bush's ear, an encyclopedic knowledge of world affairs and a diplomat's finesse. To the rest of the world, he was just another dark-suited White House worker bee, an anonymous background figure with a ruddy complexion and tortoise-shell glasses.

That changed in January, when Rice became secretary of state and Hadley took over her old national security adviser post. Now he's the one who spends at least three hours a day in the Oval Office, briefing Bush on the world crisis du jour. He's the one who referees private squabbles between Cabinet secretaries as chairman of the National Security Council. He's the one who is pushed front and center at news conferences, where he tries to illuminate the public on Bush's foreign-policy decisions without making too much news himself.

The cream-colored walls of the roomy suite that Hadley inherited from his predecessor are still dotted with picture hooks left empty by her departure. He's taking his time making his own impression on a post once held by the likes of Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy, Colin Powell and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Hadley, 58, doesn't aspire to their sort of name recognition. Public attention has always made him squirm. He wants the spotlight focused firmly on the president, not Stephen Hadley, but he recognizes the job he took in January will inevitably make him more of a public figure. After his stint as Rice's deputy, and decades of service in lower-level foreign-policy jobs during the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Hadley says he's ready for the enhanced visibility.

"There is a lot of attention to what does Colin Powell, or now Condi Rice think, what does Don Rumsfeld think, or what does the national security adviser think," Hadley says, listing his title, but not his name, among the Bush administration's opinion brokers. "What really matters is what the president of the United States thinks. The president is the architect of American foreign policy, and our job is to support him in his role."

The studious attorney wears an American flag pin on his left jacket lapel. A hexagonal blue-and-gold pin on his right lapel shows he has security clearance to enter the West Wing. The red neckties he favors add a splash of color to the conservative suits in his wardrobe, but he has yet to earn a colorful nickname from a president who relishes dishing them out. Bush simply calls him "Steve" or "Hadley." Occasionally, it's "Hads." Although Hadley is outdoorsy enough to list hiking among his hobbies, reporters once spotted him wearing penny loafers while helping Bush clear brush on his Texas ranch.

Hadley accompanies Bush on official visits and state events with world leaders but avoids the limelight. Bush occasionally teases him about his desire to remain invisible. When the president sought Hadley's input at a recent White House news conference, Bush joked that Hadley had begged to be worked into the event.

The president devoted a mere four sentences to Hadley in November when he announced his decision to shift Rice to secretary of state and appoint Hadley as national security adviser. While Rice speechified beside Bush at a podium in the Roosevelt Room, Hadley sat contentedly in the audience.

"Steve is a man of wisdom and good judgment," Bush said that day. "He has earned my trust and I look forward to his continued vital service on my national security team."

Hadley's appointment didn't require Senate confirmation, so he was spared the public grilling on Bush's international track record that Rice received after her promotion. Republicans and Democrats alike applaud Hadley's qualifications.

"He is a superb choice who needs no on-the job training because he's already dealt with the president and Condoleezza Rice on a daily basis," says Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sandy Berger, who had Hadley's job during Democrat Bill Clinton's administration, praises Hadley's reputation for brains, hard work and integrity.

"People think he is an honest broker, which is a very important attribute," Berger says. "He is not a high-profile person and not flamboyant, but he played a significant role in the first Bush term and will obviously play a more significant role in the second term."

White House watchers anticipate that shifting Rice to the State Department and giving Hadley her old office won't significantly alter the direction of Bush's foreign policy.

" I don't think there are likely to be any surprises," says Richard K. Betts, who heads Columbia University's International Security Policy program. "Hadley is a sober, balanced, careful operator, not any kind of loose cannon or ideologue. By the likes of this administration, he is a moderate. I think there will be a fair amount of continuity."

Michael Scharf, who heads Case Western Reserve University's International Law Center, compared the recent switch to Henry Kissinger's transition from national security adviser to secretary of state in the days of presidents Nixon and Ford. Kissinger held both posts until Ford appointed his ex-deputy, Brent Scowcroft, as national security adviser. Kissinger steered foreign policy from the State Department while Scowcroft kept a low profile, content to feed Ford foreign-policy information without advocating positions that might conflict with Kissinger's.

"All the power that Kissinger accrued in that position, the deputy quickly dismantled and shifted over to the State Department," says Scharf, a former state department attorney, who believes Rice will similarly drive foreign policy from her new post while Hadley plays second fiddle. "Hadley will inherit a job that will be much smaller and less influential than his predecessor had."

Hadley says his main role in the White House is to ensure that Bush receives all the information he needs to make foreign-policy decisions, understands his options and grasps the potential consequences of actions he might take. He works 14-hour days, six days a week, overseeing a 240-member staff that tracks international affairs and monitors crises throughout the globe on the White House's behalf.

Hadley's office is about 50 yards away from the president's. He spends from 7 until 10:30 each morning updating Bush on world events, attending intelligence briefings with the president, meeting with other Cabinet members and helping the president set up his day. He is usually in the room when Bush telephones foreign leaders or meets with them personally.

Hadley got in on the ground floor of Bush's foreign-policy apparatus while the Texas governor was running for president. Hadley and Rice became friendly when both held foreign-policy posts under the first President Bush: Rice headed the National Security Council's Soviet and Eastern European Affairs division, while Hadley was assistant secretary of defense for international policy. In that position, he was Dick Cheney's representative in talks that resulted in the START I and START II nuclear weapons treaties. After that, Rice asked him to join an informal eight-member group of international affairs advisers to the younger Bush. Rice called them the "Vulcans" after a giant metal statue of the Roman forge god in her hometown, Birmingham, Ala.

"It had nothing to do with `Star Trek,"' laughs Hadley, a movie buff who relaxes on Friday nights by watching videos and eating pizza at home in Washington, D.C., with his wife, a Justice Department attorney, and teenage daughters.

Rice describes Hadley as "smart, loyal, capable" and good at systematically implementing the president's policy agenda. She adds that she's always been impressed by his close relationship with his daughters, the only people whose phone calls he takes faster than the president's. She calls Hadley an excellent singer who is a standby at her yearly Christmas caroling parties, and says he often accompanies her to operas and classical music concerts at the Kennedy Center.

"Steve is someone that everybody trusts," Rice says. "When something needs to be solved, people will say, `Why don't you call Steve?"'

When Rice introduced Hadley to Bush, Hadley says he was immediately impressed with the candidate's foreign-policy instincts.

"He had a sense of strategy; of what we wanted to try and accomplish and how we could accomplish it," Hadley recalls. "He struck us all as someone who was a change agent, who wanted to leave the world and country better than he found it and wanted to use the office to do big things, not small things.

"I think he was true to his words. He has made it clear that he wanted to do big things both at home and abroad. That makes a pretty exciting leader to follow."

Hadley is quick to defend Bush's policy in Iraq, and he disputes claims that the United States invaded the Middle Eastern nation without consulting its historic allies in Europe. Hadley says the United States simply disagreed with them over the necessity to take action against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He says there were numerous consultations before the Iraq war, and that many European countries backed the United States.

"The United States is in a position to have a major impact on what happens in the world," Hadley says. "A world that reflects our values is very much a world that is in our interest and is one in which Americans will feel comfortable. What happens overseas affects us at home, and we have an opportunity to affect what happens overseas in a significant way."

He believes actions the president has taken to counter terrorists at home and abroad, such as the replacement of Afghanistan's Taliban government and Iraq's dictatorship with democratically elected leaders, have presented opportunities to advance freedom around the world.

"The Middle East region needs greater openness," he says. "The people of that region need greater opportunities to participate in their government and make decisions that affect their own lives. Until that changes, the region will be a source of despair and hopelessness that makes it a fertile ground for terrorists and raises the prospects of continuing to export terror for years to come."

Before he accepted his current post, Hadley's greatest brush with notoriety occurred when he publicly accepted responsibility for a 16-word misstatement in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech that opponents of the Iraq war seized upon to bludgeon Bush.

In the speech, Bush cited intelligence reports that indicated that Saddam had tried to acquire uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa even though the Central Intelligence Agency believed those reports were wrong. CIA Director George Tenet asked Hadley to remove the controversial assertion from a prior speech, but Hadley forgot that warning when the claim next appeared. A political tempest ensued. Hadley apologized for the oversight and offered to resign, but Bush wouldn't let him.

"That was not my best day" is all Hadley will say about the brouhaha.

Hadley's friends say that episode illustrates his integrity.

"Steve is an honest, straightforward person who will talk about his mistakes and correct them when others won't want to admit they made any mistakes," says Cornell University foreign-relations professor Walter LaFeber, who taught Hadley and Berger as undergraduate students in the 1960s.

Hadley says LaFeber's classes steered him toward his foreign-policy career, and "opened up the world for him," by making him recognize the United States' key global role. But Hadley's first interest in government emerged during his years as a teenage bookworm, when he read Allen Drury's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning political thriller, "Advise and Consent." Fascinated by its portrayal of life in Washington, Hadley gravitated toward student government. He participated in Ohio's Boys State government education program and became high school student council president.

After Cornell, Hadley attended Yale Law School, where he befriended one of the few women enrolled, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hadley remains cordial with the former first lady-turned-Democratic senator from New York, although they don't talk much anymore.

A Yale classmate, Arthur C. Kaminski, remembers discussing Hillary with Hadley when Bill Clinton began his run for president and Hadley worked in the Defense Department for the first President Bush.

"I asked him if he thought she was the smartest woman in the class, and he looked at me and said, `I thought she was the smartest of all of us,"' Kaminski says. "That is quintessential Hadley. He is the most open-minded guy in the world. Even though his politics are much different from Hillary's, he recognizes her intelligence. A lot of people in D.C. have no use for people who aren't on their side, and that isn't him at all."

After Yale, Hadley worked as an analyst for the comptroller of the Department of Defense during the waning days of the Nixon administration, and joined the National Security Council under President Ford. Between GOP presidential administrations, he has been a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Shea & Gardner and a principal in The Scowcroft Group Inc., an international consulting firm headed by former national security adviser Scowcroft.

In his new job, Hadley is starting to step out of the shadows. He accompanied Bush on a recent state trip to Europe, has held a news conference or two, and has been grilled on Sunday morning talk shows by Wolf Blitzer and Chris Wallace. But old habits die hard.

When Bush's foreign-affairs team boarded Air Force One on the way to Europe, Rice says Hadley showed up for their flight wearing "a tweedy men's hat, in a funny blue tweed."

"I thought it looked fine, but he was sure everyone was staring at his hat," Rice recalls. "Two or three people mentioned the hat, including the president. He decided the hat had to stay home. To him, it was calling too much attention to himself. That's the way he is.

"He will kill me for telling you about it, but I'm down the street now, so he can't get me."

May 1, 2005



(Sabrina Eaton is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at magmail@plaind.com.)