Now that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is officially the nominee to be secretary of state, attention is shifting to who would be her choice as second in command.

The name most widely discussed as a possible deputy secretary of state is James B. Steinberg, the co-director of President-elect Obama's transition team. But other names are circulating as well, including that of former Hillary campaign adviser Richard Holbrooke.

The deputy secretary of state is much more than just a shadow of the boss. Currently, while Secretary Condoleezza Rice acts as the public face of American diplomacy, her deputy, John Negroponte, puts his own stamp on the machinery of foreign policy.

The Current Deputy

Negroponte came to the job after serving as a diplomatic point man for some of the toughest policies of President George W. Bush, and he has been accused by Democrats of being part of an alleged Bush administration effort to politicize career employees at the State Department.

Bush's appointment of Negroponte as ambassador to the United Nations in 2001 was contentious, opposed by Senate Democrats who accused Negroponte of keeping silent about human rights abuses in Honduras when he was ambassador there during the Reagan administration.

Negroponte was seen as a hardball player at the U.N., and he had a key role in getting the Security Council to pass a resolution demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm.

In 2004, Negroponte was named the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, taking over from Paul Bremer as the top-ranking American civilian in the U.S. occupation. He went from there to become the first director of national intelligence before returning to the State Department as deputy secretary.

Up Next?

The front-runner to succeed Negroponte, James Steinberg, is not a career foreign service officer, but he has long experience with foreign policy and national security issues. He's often described as intense and a workaholic with a short temper.

Steinberg is currently the dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He was deputy national security adviser during the Clinton administration, and he was an informal adviser to Obama during the presidential campaign. Steinberg accompanied Obama on his trip last summer to Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.

Philip Zelikow, a Republican who was formerly a top advisor to Secretary Rice, says he thinks Steinberg would be a good choice, in part because Steinberg's current job in Texas has given him experience and contacts beyond the usually East Coast-centered foreign policy establishment.

There's some question as to whether any of the contenders for top foreign policy jobs can shake that East Coast establishment label. Steinberg graduated from Harvard and went on to Yale Law - not so different from Negroponte, who graduated from Yale and went on to Harvard Law.

Steinberg clerked for a federal judge after law school, worked as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and was an analyst at Rand Corp. before coming back to government in the Clinton administration.

Zelikow points out that Steinberg knows the State Department well, from having served as its director of policy planning from 1994 to 1996. The Office of Policy Planning is known as the State Department's internal think tank, and a successful director has to work closely and well with the secretary of state, something that Steinberg did with then-Secretary Warren Christopher.

Robert White, the president of the Center for International Policy in Washington, says he thinks Steinberg has the broad policy base that would make for a good deputy secretary. White, a former ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador, says the deputy doesn't necessarily need to be a professional foreign service officer - in fact he says, "probably not. [The job] really calls for someone who's a generalist, rather a regional specialist."

Holbrooke's Status

But White also thinks former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke could be a strong candidate for the job.

"He has decided views," says White, "but he knows who's in charge, and he can reach out to people outside the foreign service community."

Holbrooke doesn't exactly break the East Coast establishment mold, either. He went to Brown and Princeton before starting his foreign service career in Vietnam, working alongside other rising young diplomats, including Negroponte and Anthony Lake, now a key adviser to the president-elect.

Holbrooke is best known as the main broker of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. He was a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign but had enough support among Democrats of all stripes to be considered among the leading contenders for the secretary of state job before Obama announced Clinton as his choice.

Some think that Holbrooke is a personality better suited to being in charge than to working as a deputy. Zelikow calls him "a powerful artillery shell that should be aimed at a specific target," that is, a tough, high-profile job such as reviving the Middle East peace process.

The timing might be good for Holbrooke to return to government in some capacity. During the periods when he was out of government, he held high-ranking positions at various Wall Street firms, including Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston. Holbrooke resigned last July as a board member of AIG, the insurance giant that received a $152 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve after it announced a liquidity crisis in September.

By Corey Flintoff, NPR, December 4, 2008