Would bring to the job: Foreign policy experience dating to the Kennedy administration, when he served in the State Department. Mr. Lake has moved between academic and government positions for more than four decades. He cut his teeth in the Foreign Service in Vietnam and was an aide to Henry A. Kissinger, before resigning in 1970 to protest the broadening of the war into Cambodia.
Is linked to Mr. Obama by: Years of consulting on foreign policy. An adviser over the years to Democratic presidents and presidential candidates, he has told friends that he first heard about Mr. Obama in 2002 when he was asked to speak to him about foreign policy. Mr. Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, was considering a run for the United States Senate. The two men would chat on the phone from time to time. In December 2006, Mr. Obama called Mr. Lake and told him he planned to run for president, asking him if he would be a co-leader of his foreign policy team, along with Susan E. Rice, who had been assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Clinton.
Carries as baggage: His failed nomination in 1997 to become C.I.A. director. The nomination became bogged down as Congressional critics of the Clinton administration chided Mr. Lake for what they called his anemic response to campaign fund-raising abuses that swirled around President Bill Clinton while Mr. Lake was national security adviser. In particular, critics complained that Mr. Lake’s staff made little effort to control the flow of foreign visitors to the White House and raised few objections about questionable people who received audiences with Mr. Clinton.
In his own words: I have gone through the past three months and more with patience and, I hope, dignity. But I have lost the former and could lose the latter as this political circus continues indefinitely.” (In a letter to Mr. Clinton withdrawing his name from consideration as C.I.A. director)
Used to work as: National security adviser to Mr. Clinton. In the Carter administration, he worked under Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance in the State Department’s policy and planning office.
Also known for: Converting to Judaism in 2005 after he began dating Julie Katzman, a Jewish investment banker, whom he later married.
Résumé includes: Bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, Harvard University, 1961, and Ph.D., Princeton University, 1974 ...three children with his first wife ... the author of “The Tar Baby Option: American Policy Toward Southern Rhodesia,” 1976; “Third World Radical Regimes: U.S. Policy Under Carter and Reagan,” 1985; “Somoza Falling: A Case Study of Washington at Work,” 1989; and “6 Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them,” 2000.
In 1975, Mr. Lake co-wrote a 1975 article for The New York Times Magazine, with his first wife, Antonia, called “Coming of Age Through Vietnam: The Romance of Power: His, Hers — and Ours.” In the article, the two take turns expressing to each other their disillusionment with the war in Vietnam, as well as the initial thrill that came before that disillusionment. “Driving at high speed along a road on which there had been ambushes, vaguely secure in the knowledge that they were nonetheless rare, one felt a heightened sense of being alive,” Mr. Lake wrote.