Leslie H. Gelb

Leslie (Les) Howard Gelb (born March 4, 1937) is one of America’s most prominent foreign policy experts. A former Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times, and senior official in the Departments of Defense and State, he is currently president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, having served as president of that institution from 1993-2003. He is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense can Rescue American Policy, to be published by HarperCollins in March 2009, a book that shows how to think about and use power in the twenty-first century.

Background

Dr. Gelb graduated with a B.A. from Tufts University in 1959, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1964. He married his wife, Judith Cohen, on 2 August 1959 and lives in New York City. A father of three children, he received the Father of the Year Award in 1993.

Career

He entered government service in 1966 as an executive assistant to Senator Jacob Javits. From 1967-1969, he served in the Department of Defense as the director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs. Among his responsibilities was overseeing the Pentagon Papers Project chronicling the Vietnam conflict. Dr. Gelb left government in 1969, and spent five years as a Diplomatic Correspondent at the New York Times. He rejoined the bureaucracy in 1977 as the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs in the Carter Administration.

Returning to the New York Times in 1981, Dr. Gelb held a variety of positions there over the next 13 years including National Security Correspondent, Op-Ed Page Editor, Deputy Editorial Page Editor, and Columnist, winning a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1986. Dr. Gelb left the New York Times in 1993 to become President of the Council on Foreign Relations, overseeing the rejuvenation of one of America’s most esteemed non-profit institutions. He stepped down after ten years, and has served as president emeritus since.

He serves as the chairman of the advisory board for the progressive foreign policy think tank, National Security Network, on the board of directors of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, member of the board of directors of the Truman scholars program, board of directors of the Nixon Center.

Gelb contributes to The Daily Beast, a news aggregation site.

Selected Publications

• The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (1980)
• Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (1984, co-author with I. M. Destler and Anthony Lake)
• Anglo-American Relations, 1945-1950: Toward a Theory of Alliances (1988)
• Claiming the Heavens: The New York Times Complete Guide to the Star Wars Debate (coauthor, Crown Publishing Group, 1988)
• Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (2009)

Notes

1. ^ Department of Government at Wesleyan University

External links

• Interview with Nermeen Shaikh at Asia Society
• Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA)
• Leslie Gelb's Blog at The Daily Beast

• Biographies:
  • CFR (Council on Foreign Relations)
  • MSSU (Missouri Southern State University)
  • NNDB (Notable Names Database)
  • EB (Encyclopædia Britannica)