Path to Power
Jones was born on Dec. 19, 1943, in Kansas City, Mo. He grew up in Paris and is fluent in French.
The 6’ 4” athlete played basketball for Georgetown University. He received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 1966.
Jones served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was a platoon and company commander. He took command positions at Camp Pendleton and Okinawa.
Jones returned to Washington in the early 1980s to work as the Marine Corps liaison officer to the Senate. In that position, he developed a friendship with Sen. McCain.
In 1986, he returned to a leadership position in the Marine Corps. In 1992, following the first Gulf War, he ran a mission to help thousands of Kurdish refugees who had been forced to flee northern Iraq after the Iraqi Army quelled an uprising by forcing the Kurds out of their homes.
In 1997, Jones accepted a position as military assistant to Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry. In 1999, he was nominated to serve as Commandant of the Marine Corps by President Bill Clinton, beating out several other prominent four-star candidates.
In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Jones the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO military forces, a position that made him the first Marine to hold the prestigious position. Bush said he nominated Jones in an effort to “shake off” Cold War thinking and make the Armed Forces more mobile and up-to-date.
In that role, Jones worked tirelessly to convince NATO nations to unite to develop a military strategy in Afghanistan. He struggled to convince U.S. allies to provide troops they had promised. In 2004, Jones called for a doubling of the troops provided to the region in order to secure the country beyond Kabul, its capital.
Jones stepped down as NATO commander in February 2006. He has continued to urge NATO to increase its ground force in Afghanistan.
In his post-NATO life, Jones continued to work with top Bush administration officials to develop foreign policy and military strategy. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appointed Jones as a special envoy for Middle East security. He also headed the non-partisan Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, an independent group that examined the effectiveness of Iraq’s police force in 2006. The report was paid particular attention by Congress.
Jones is close friends with McCain, and though he briefed President Obama on Afghanistan and energy policy during the 2008 presidential campaign, he did not endorse Obama.
Nonetheless, Jones was mentioned as a possible Democratic vice presidential contender, although reports suggest he wasn’t formally vetted and was not a finalist for the job. Some speculated that Jones’ name had only been leaked to lend President Obama national security credentials.
Jones is the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for 21st Century Energy, a group that works inside the chamber to develop approaches to sustainable energy creation and consumption.
Early Days in the White House
In his first several months in Obama's White House, Jones was criticized by some staffers for spending too little time with Obama and in the office. Jones will sometimes leave work at lunch for a bike ride, and returns home around 7 P.M. every day, unusual in an office full of staffers used to burning the midnight oil. "The national security adviser needs to be behind the president," author and blogger David Rothkopf told the New York Times. Jones is not "seen as a guy in the room."
But his leadership style seems to fit quite naturally with Obama. As head of the National Security Council, Jones emphasized team building, and has advocated for a "bottom-up approach" where working groups develop proposals for solutions, then pass them on to a committee of deputies. He was praised in The Washington Post for launching a restructuring of the council so that it could tackle modern issues like energy and climate change. "If you want things to go beyond your tenure you'd better get a lot of buy-in into the big things," he told the Post.
His intimate relationship with Obama was only strengthened by the President's deliberations over Afghanistan. In Oct. 2009, Obama faced pressures to increase his troop presence in the failing country, and he relied on the retired general both for advice and as a conduit to communicate with other generals.
