Strobe Talbott

Talbott was born in Dayton, Ohio, to Helen Josephine (Large) and Nelson Strobridge "Bud" Talbott II.[2] He attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and graduated in 1968 from Yale University, where he had been chairman of the Yale Daily News, a position whose previous incumbents include Henry Luce, William F. Buckley, and Joe Lieberman. He was awarded Yale's Alpheus Henry Snow Prize. He was also a member of the Scholar of the House program in 1967–68, and belonged to a society of juniors and seniors called Saint Anthony Hall. He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford;[3] during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.[3]

Talbott with George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece, 2009

In 1972, Talbott, along with friend and fellow Rhodes Scholar Robert Reich and friend David E. Kendall, rallied their friends Bill and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s.[4] Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001. After leaving government, he was, for a period, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.[5]

Talbott with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev whilst the latter was on a visit to the United States in April 2010

Talbott with Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016

Talbott was the sixth president of the Brookings Institution in Washington from 2002 to 2017. He helped raise more than $650 million in support of independent policy research and analysis.[6] At Brookings, he was responsible for formulating and setting policies, recommending projects, approving publications and selecting staff.[7] with specialties on Europe, Russia,[8] South Asia and nuclear arms control.[9] On January 31, 2017, Talbott announced his resignation from the Brookings Institution. The resignation was later retracted, but in October he was succeeded by General John R. Allen.[10][6]

Talbott currently sits on the advisory board of the DC non-profit America Abroad Media.[11]

He married Brooke Shearer in 1971. Talbott was roommate with her brother, Derek.[12] Brooke, who was Talbott's wife of 38 years, died on May 19, 2009.[13] He has two sons, Devin and Adrian, co-founders of Generation Engage.[14] In 2015, he married the author Barbara Lazear Ascher.[15]

• "In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all." (Time)[16]
• "The Russians have provided an opening for renewed diplomacy. Since last summer, President Dmitry Medvedev has been calling for a 'new Euro-Atlantic security architecture'. So far, except for rehashing old complaints and the unacceptable claim that other former Soviet republics fall within Russia's 'sphere of privileged interests', Mr Medvedev and Mr Lavrov have been vague about what they have in mind.

"That creates a vacuum that the United States and its European partners can fill with their own proposals. The theme of those should be accelerating the emergence of an international system (of which NATO is a part) that is prepared to include Russia rather than exclude or contain it, and to encourage positive forces in Russia that want to see their nation integrated in a globalized world organized around the search for common solutions to common problems." (Financial Times)[17]

• "We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker…. Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency."[18]

• Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (2016)
• Order of the Golden Fleece (Georgia)

• Finan, Bill. "Nuclear Diplomacy Up Close: Strobe Talbott on the Clinton Administration and India." India Review (Jan 2005) 4#1, pp 84-97.
• Lane, Charles. "The Master of the Game: A journey down the paper trail of Strobe Talbott: Russophile, establishmentarian, … ", The New Republic, March 7, 1994. (pp. 19–29)

• Strobe Talbott's Brookings Expert Page
• Talbott lecture at Ditchley Foundation, July 2010
• Appearances on C-SPAN