You think it’s so great being Rahm Emanuel?

One of the enduring mysteries about White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is why he took the job in the first place. At the time he accepted it, he was the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, a position he’d attained with considerable effort. Two years earlier, Emanuel had chaired the House Democrats’ campaign arm and led the party to a 31-seat majority after a decade of futility. It was a grueling undertaking--Emanuel shed 14 pounds during the two-year stint, went months without a decent night’s sleep, consumed appalling quantities of caffeine--and it entailed significant professional risk. Had Emanuel come up short in an election cycle many Democrats deemed their best shot in years, he might have spent the rest of his career on the backbenches. Instead, on the eve of Barack Obama’s victory, only three colleagues stood between him and the coveted House speakership, and they were all two decades older.

So why was Emanuel so keen to walk away? The short answer is that he wasn’t. Once a day between the moment Obama offered the job and the moment he took it a week later, Emanuel would call his brother Zeke--a prominent bioethicist who would later join the administration--and rant about why he should say no: “I have a great life. I’m going to rise up in the House leadership, be the first Jewish speaker,” he’d bellow. Emanuel would continue in this vein for 20, 30, sometimes 40 minutes. Then he would abruptly hang up, only to start in all over again the next day.

Still, there was never much doubt he would sign on. “He had twenty-seven reasons--he wants to spend time with his kids, be a devoted father. They’re at a tender age. I mean, all of them were right. But too bad,” says Zeke, nodding at the family ethic of public service. “He knew he had to take the job. He had no choice. It was his duty. ... It was everything that had gone into forty-nine years of him being raised.”

One can understand Emanuel’s hesitation. Laboring as White House chief of staff is fantastically difficult under any circumstances, something Emanuel learned well as an aide to Bill Clinton. Former George W. Bush chief of staff Andy Card famously arrived at the White House by 5:30 each morning and stayed until eight or nine each night. But laboring as chief of staff during the first year or two of a presidency can be a prolonged form of torture.

A new White House tends to be heavily populated with campaign personnel, many of whom have little experience at governing, much less in the West Wing. Yet they will have earned a claim on a job whether or not the chief of staff wants them there. This dynamic typically fades over time, as campaign veterans get replaced by operatives with a less personal connection to the president. When Erskine Bowles took over as Bill Clinton’s third chief of staff in late 1996, he brought in two new deputies, Sylvia Matthews and John Podesta. But the tension can be a major source of frustration in the early going. And, in fact, Emanuel was denied the luxury of choosing his own deputies. (One of his preferred candidates, Tom Donilon, later resurfaced as deputy national security advisor.)