Biden’s national security adviser, now a Harvard professor, confesses: ‘he had lain awake many nights’
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, can’t sleep in the aftermath of the war between Israel and Hamas, he says.
Sullivan, a longtime Democratic foreign policy hand who is now Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School, made the confession to the New Yorker magazine’s David Kirkpatrick for an interminable article that appears in the July 27, 2026 issue. The article carries the headline “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—And Iran,” with the subheadline, “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.”
“Sullivan, whose role as national-security adviser made him the last to leave the room before Biden made a decision, told me that he had lain awake many nights thinking about what the U.S. might have done differently,” the article says. It is not clear whether the U.S. departure from Afghanistan, which left 13 American service members dead and tens of millions of Afghans in the clutches of the Taliban, is also disrupting his sleeping, but advertising that fact certainly wouldn’t help him secure a cabinet position in the next Democratic administration, nor would admitting he’s had second thoughts about deceiving the American people with regard to President Biden’s mental faculties.
Sullivan, unlike New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, hasn’t publicly accused Israel of genocide. Nor has Sullivan advocated wiping Israel off the map, the goal sought by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and their America-hating Iranian sponsors. That’s earned him the enmity of rabid anti-Israel groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which wrote to Harvard president Alan Garber and Harvard Kennedy School dean Jeremy Weinstein in March 2025 urging them to revoke Sullivan’s appointment, which they said “gave new meaning to the concept of failing up and showed a racist disregard for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians … Mr. Sullivan helped slaughter.”
Sullivan didn’t respond immediately to an inquiry the Washington Free Beacon sent to his office asking when these sleepless nights were, whether they are ongoing, and whether he has sought any help for it.
His Harvard website lists courses on “National Security Decision Making” and “The Policy and Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence.” Usually the risk in a university class is that the students fall asleep, but unless Sullivan rests up, there’s a chance he could doze off himself, like President Biden during meetings in the waning days of his administration.
A Washington Post article published this week flagged “changes to sleep” as a possible warning sign of more serious medical problems. “Insomnia or reduced nighttime rest can also precede dementia. One study of more than 4,400 cognitively healthy older adults found that having less nighttime sleep or more daytime sleep was linked to an increased accumulation of amyloid beta — a biological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — in the brain,” the Post reported, suggesting that people with these concerns talk to their doctors.
If the issue is policy-related rather than neurological, one thing Sullivan or Biden might have done better is communicate more directly that America would not restrain Israel or withhold weapons. Once President Trump took office and adopted that approach, Hamas released all its remaining hostages.
As for the idea that Sullivan might somehow have saved Palestinian lives by being tougher on Israel, that’s absurd. The Israeli public wouldn’t have accepted an Israeli surrender, and the U.S. attempting to force that would have amounted to a victory for the Iran-backed terrorists. Had such a policy played out, it wouldn’t only be Sullivan tossing and turning in bed, but Israelis still facing a Hamas threat or awaiting the return of hostages. And even, perhaps, some Gazans dismayed to be consigned to permanent rule by Hamas thugs.
It’s tempting to see these publicly voiced retrospective doubts as suspiciously convenient, calculated to make Sullivan and his peers more acceptable for jobs in a future Democratic administration that will be more anti-Israel.
I tend to accept the remarks, in Sullivan’s case, at least, as sincere. Perhaps I’m too generous—it’s one of my weaknesses—but I actually feel sorry for the guy.
From afar, Sullivan looks like a tremendous success by all the usual career and status standards. A Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Yale, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (he also won a Marshall scholarship but declined it like one of his other anti-Israel critics), he was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He’s married to Rep. Maggie Goodlander, a Democrat of New Hampshire. Goodlander, a Navy Reserve veteran and former aide to Senator Joe Lieberman, recently signed a pledge in favor of capitalism and patriotism, though also voted for the Massie amendment to cut aid to Israel. Sullivan will turn 50 in November. He’s a professor at Harvard, and he also does presumably lucrative paid work for Morgan Stanley, D.E. Shaw, and other financial industry clients. He can claim a residence in New Hampshire, a state with no income tax. He’s largely avoided the full-on Bernie Sanders lurch into anti-Israel monomania that has afflicted his Obama administration colleague Ben Rhodes, though he does serve with Rhodes on an advisory board for Foreign Policy for America, a group that is pushing the “genocide” blood libel against Israel. He also joined the board of Rhodes’s Soros-funded National Security Action, led by longtime anti-Israel activist Maher Bitar.
Yet the guy is apparently so plagued with self-doubt and insecurity and misplaced guilt that he can’t even get a good night’s sleep. He’s intelligent enough that he’s probably already taken the obvious steps—cut out the alcohol, reduce the caffeine, get outdoor exercise, put the phone away an hour before bedtime, make sure the room is dark, take some deep breaths and let them out slowly. Perhaps the problem is that Sullivan is hanging out with the wrong crowd, peers who hate Israel and think it was wrong to help it defend itself against a terrorist onslaught. No one wants public servants who are arrogant or cocksure. But if all those Yale and Oxford degrees didn’t convey the core conviction or value that backing Israel against the terrorists was the right thing, maybe they aren’t so impressive after all. One bedtime routine I learned in religious day school and summer camp but not at Harvard was prayer to the God of the Hebrew Bible. Sweet dreams, Professor Sullivan.
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