David M. Abshire

David M. Abshire is president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and president of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation of New York. He is the vice chairman of the board of CSIS and was its cofounder in 1962. He cofounded with Kazuo Inamori the CSIS Abshire-Inamori Leadership Academy in 2002. Dr. Abshire is a graduate of West Point, where in 1996 he received the Distinguished Graduate Award. He was decorated during the Korean War as a company commander. He received a PhD in history from Georgetown University, where for many years he served as an adjunct professor. His full-time government service includes congressional staff (1958–1960), assistant secretary of state for congressional relations (1970–1973), U.S. ambassador to NATO (1983–1987), and special counsellor to President Ronald Reagan (1987). As ambassador to NATO, he was given the highest Defense Department civilian award—the Distinguished Public Service Medal. His part-time government service includes chairman of the Board for International Broadcasting (1975–1977) and member of the Murphy Commission (1974–1975), the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1981–1982), and the President’s Task Force on U.S. Governmental International Broadcasting (1991). Dr. Abshire is vice chairman of the Council on American Ambassadors, and he served for nine years on the board of Proctor & Gamble. He is a trustee of the George C. Marshall Foundation, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Public Service at St. Albans School, the Council on Competitiveness, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Fondation Paul-Henri Spaak in Brussels, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Ogden Corporation and on the Advisory Board of BP America. He has been decorated by seven heads of government and received three honorary degrees. He is editor of Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency: Seventy-Six Case Studies in Presidential Leadership (Praeger, 2001) and founding editor of The Washington Quarterly. The most recent of his seven books is Call to Greatness: Challenging Our Next President, 2008 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).