Stephen Hadley

Early life and education

Hadley was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of Suzanne (née Bentley), a homemaker, and Robert W. Hadley, Jr., an electrical engineer. He grew up in South Euclid, Ohio, in the Cleveland metropolitan area. After reading the Allen Drury novel Advise and Consent, he became intrigued by the governing process and ran for and henceforth and therewith was elected student body president of Charles F. Brush High School. Hadley graduated from there as the valedictorian in 1965.

He received a B.A. degree in government from Cornell University in 1969, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity, the Cornell University Glee Club, and the Quill and Dagger society.

He then received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Yale Law School in 1972 where was Note and Comment Editor of the Yale Law Journal. There he knew his classmate Hillary Rodham.

Military service

Hadley served as an officer in the United States Navy from 1972 to 1975. This included being an analyst for the Comptroller of the Department of Defense from 1972 to 1974.

Government service during Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations

Hadley was a member of the National Security Council staff under President Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977.

During this period he worked for the law firm of Shea & Gardner.

From 1986 to 1987 he served as Counsel to the Special Review Board established by President Ronald Reagan to inquire into U.S. arms sales to Iran.

During the administration of George H. W. Bush, Hadley was a Pentagon aide to Paul Wolfowitz, serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1989 to 1993. In that position, he had responsibility for defense policy toward NATO and Western Europe, on nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defense, and arms control. He also participated in policy issues involving export control and the use of space. Hadley served as Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's representative in talks led by Secretary of State James Baker that resulted in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, START I and START II.

Private sector work

During the years in which the Democratic Clinton administration was in power (1993-2001), Hadley was an administrative partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Shea & Gardner, where he had worked earlier in his career. His professional legal practice focused on business problems of U.S. and foreign corporations particularly as they involve international business, regulatory, and strategy issues. These representations included export controls, foreign investment in U.S. national security companies, and the national security responsibilities of U.S. information technology companies.

He was also a principal in The Scowcroft Group, Inc., an international consulting firm. In this, he represented U.S. corporate clients seeking to invest and do business overseas.

Campaign and transition

Hadley served as a senior foreign and defense policy adviser to Governor Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign and worked in the Bush-Cheney Transition on the National Security Council.

In January 2001, as George W. Bush prepared to take office, Hadley served on a panel for nuclear weapons issues sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. Other members of the panel included Stephen Cambone, William Schneider, and Robert Joseph. This panel advocated using tactical nuclear weapons as a standard part of the United States defense arsenal.

Deputy National Security Advisor

He was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor from January 22, 2001. In 2002, Hadley was a member of the White House Iraq Group. He admitted fault in allowing a disputed claim about Iraq's quest for nuclear weapons material from Niger to be included in Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union Address (see Niger uranium forgeries). On July 22, 2003, Hadley offered his resignation to Bush because he had "failed in that responsibility" and that "the high standards the president set were not met." Bush denied Hadley's request. Amid this, The Times of London reported that Hadley was Robert Novak's source for Valerie Plame's name in the CIA leak scandal, but this report proved to be false when Richard Armitage admitted that he was Novak's source.

National Secuity Advisor

On January 26, 2005, he replaced Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor, upon Rice's confirmation as Secretary of State. In that capacity he was the principal White House foreign policy advisor to President Bush, directed the National Security Council staff, and ran the interagency national security policy development and execution process.

In 2007 Hadley led a public media campaign in an effort to convince the public that the proposed Iraq surge would work.

Hadley was known for avoiding focused public attention. In a 2006 profile, the Washington Post described Hadley as "a modest man in an immodest job. In a town populated by people nursing grandiose views of their own importance and scheming for greater glory, Hadley still thinks of himself as a staff man. He sits at the pinnacle of power, but articulates no sweeping personal vision of the world and has made a point of staying in the shadows."

In his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former President Jimmy Carter recounts that Hadley, in his capacity as national security adviser (Carter calls him by title rather than by name) personally denied Carter permission to visit Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in early 2005, in the wake of the administration's decision to isolate the regime, due its "differences with Syria concerning U.S. policy in Iraq".

Member

Hadley is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been a member of the Defense Policy Board, the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, the National Security Advisory Panel to the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Board of Trustees of Analytical Services ("ANSER").

Hadley on the Board of Directors at defense contractor Raytheon.

Post-Bush administration

Beginning in 2009, Hadley served as senior adviser for international affairs at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. On January 24, 2014, he was elected chairman of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Hadley is a co-founder and principal, along with Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates and Anja Manuel, in RiceHadleyGates, a strategic consulting firm.

In 2013, Hadley was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.

In March 2013, on the ten year anniversary, Hadley gave his views on what had gone wrong and what had been redeemed in terms of the Iraq War.

During the Syrian chemical weapons crisis in September 2013, Hadley appeared on Bloomberg TV, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and also wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post in which he advocated attacking Syria with missiles. At the time, Hadley was a director at Raytheon and owned 11,477 shares of stock, but the news organizations failed to disclose the link and conflict of interest.

Hadley was initially floated as a potential option for Secretary of Defense under the Trump Administration. In this as well as for other positions, it was thought his process knowledge could be beneficial. Instead, in late 2016 he collaborated with Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on a plan for a new course in America's approach to the Middle East.

Family life

Hadley lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Ann, a Justice Department lawyer. They have two daughters.