Leslie H. Gelb
President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations, & winner of the Pulitzer Prize

One of the foremost writers and thinkers on American foreign policy, Leslie Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before serving as the council’s president, he spent many years with The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. At the Times he served as a columnist, deputy editor of the editorial page, editor of the op-ed page, and national security correspondent.

Gelb was assistant secretary of state in the Jimmy Carter administration and director of policy planning and arms control for international security affairs at the Defense Department from 1967 to 1969, where he won the Distinguished Service Award, the Pentagon’s highest honor.

Gelb holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Tufts University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Before his career as a journalist, Gelb taught at Wesleyan University and was executive assistant to Senator Jacob Javits. His books include The Irony of Vietnam and Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy. He received the Father of the Year Award in 1993.

Gelb recently returned from a visit to Iraq in which he observed the conflict there firsthand. His impressions from that trip can be found, among other places, in articles he has written for The Wall Street Journal and in interviews with National Public Radio.

Photo © Ken Levinson