tuesday, december 21, 2010


Style ABCDE C EZ SU


Hehad the quirky gift of living large and over-sharing.” —The Reliable Source on former Wizards star and gossip factory Gilbert Arenas. C2


KIDSPOST


Get out your pencils It’s time for the 2010 News Quiz. And if you get all the answers right, you’ll have a chance to win a bag of books, toys and games! C10


SINGLESFILE


Kanye’s kind of Christmas West (right) is joined by seven hip-hop artists for “Christmas in Harlem.” C3


MUSICREVIEW


A pianist’s D.C. debut Ukraine’s Stanislav Khristenko emphasized Russian fare at the Phillips Collection. C2


Is the Donilon Doctrine the new New World Order?


Howa practiced political hand is teaching Obama—and the U.S.—to look further East


BY JASONHOROWITZ On a Friday evening in 1979, President


Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, called the White House looking for someone to tell him which Cabinet officialshadrefusedrequests tocampaign for theembattledpresident.TomDonilon, a 23-year-old staffer, took the call and spent theweekendcompilingamemoand printing out stacks of evidence. Jordan took the incriminating papers to Camp David, where Carter presided over an administration-wide “domestic summit,” and slammed themdown on the table. A weeklater,CarteraskedhisentireCabinet to resign. “And that’s how Tom was discovered,”


saidTadDevine, aDemocraticmedia con- sultant andlifelong friendofDonilon. The creation myth has become Wash-


ingtonfolklore,asDonilonhas completed a metamorphosis three decades in the making, risingtothepositionofPresident Obama’s national secu- rity adviser and the pa- tronsaint of staffers. “It’s the kind of job


I’ve been preparing for, foralongtime, frankly,” said Donilon, 55. Ac- cording to one senior administration official, granted anonymity to describe internaldelib- erations, Donilon picked the national se- curity job over that of White House chief of staff, despite the entreaties of Rahm Emanuel and having beengivenhispick ofposts byObama. A chief of staff job would have had


TomDonilon, Obama’s new security pick.


Donilontending to the internal bruises of an administration battered by midterm elections and an abysmal economy. In- stead,hechosetofocushis later life’swork on the post-Bush-era rebuilding of a na- tional security decision-making process and, more ambitiously, the shifting of America’s stance in the world. To the extent that there is aDonilonDoctrine, it envisions a re-balancing of resources and interestsawayfromAfghanistan, theMid- dle East and Europe and toward Asia, where he sees America building bigger, better relationshipswithChinaandIndia. “This posture thing is very, very impor-


tant,” Donilon said. “Where do we need more emphasis?Where dowe needmore resources and attention?AndAsiawas an


donilon continued on C4 WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION; PHOTO BY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES WORKFORCE:JacquelineKennedy Onassis started at Viking Press but moved to Doubleday, where she rose to senior editor. Awoman ofmany titles Competing works offer similar takes on Jackie’s days as an editor BY JOSEPH KANON Special to The Washington Post C


ompeting books always bring out the best in everybody. These two accounts of Jacque- line Kennedy Onassis’s 19 years as a book editor are hitting bookstores within days of each other, and the fur has already started


flying. (The launch of “Jackie as Editor” was acceler- ated to early January to go head-to-head with “Read- ing Jackie.”) In a recent newspaper article, William Kuhn, author of “Reading Jackie,” characterized Greg Lawrence, author of “Jackie as Editor,” as “difficult.” And that’s just a preview of what he prints about Lawrence in his book: “high maintenance,” “he’s the problem,” etc., according to people who worked with Lawrence at Doubleday (which is, perhaps not coinci- dentally, publishing Kuhn’s book). Some of these same people appear — surprise — in a less flattering light in Lawrence’s version. This was probably inevitable. Lawrence was one of


BOOK WORLD


JACKIE AS EDITOR The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis By Greg Lawrence. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. 322 pp. $25.99


READING JACKIE Her Autobiography in Books By William Kuhn. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 350 pp. $27.95


Jackie’s authors—he wrote three books for her with his former wife, ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, so he is fair game for his rival biographer. And like Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold in “Gigi,” they remember things, well, differently. How did review- ers take to Kirkland’s first book? In Lawrence’s view, they were “pretty much evenly divided.” From Kuhn’s perspective, they were “almost universally hostile.” Kuhnhas aDoubleday veteransaying Jackiehadlittle personal contact with Lawrence and Kirkland. Law- renceremembersher as “our special friendandally— our own fairy godmother and prodding mother hen.” And so on. This kind of literary food fight over an American icon can be a lot of fun to watch (though, perhaps, not for the authors), but what about the books themselves? Kuhn, a historian, tries to take the high groundand


present himself as more authoritative, but Lawrence is just as knowledgeable (for one thing, he inter- viewed more people than Kuhn), and, in fact, they


book world continued on C9


Music: Justin Townes Earle isn’t just his father’s son. Page C2


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56