The American Presidency: A Look Forward

Featuring:

• Ted Sorensen, former special counsel and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and author of Counselor
• Sidney Blumenthal, fellow, Center on Law and Security, former senior adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, and former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton
• Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
• Moderated by Stephen Holmes, Meyer Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

SPEAKER BIOS

Theodore C. Sorensen, former special counsel and adviser to President John F. Kennedy and a widely published author on the presidency and foreign affairs, practiced international law for more than 36 years as a senior partner, and now of counsel, at the prominent U.S. law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. The former chairman of the firm’s International Practice Committee, he has represented U.S. and multinational corporations in negotiations with governments all over the world and advised and assisted a large number of foreign governments and government leaders, ranging from the late President Sadat of Egypt to former President Mandela of South Africa.

Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, and President Bill Clinton. He is regular columnist for the UK newspaper, The Guardian and a commentator on politics. His columns appear on OpenDemocracy.net, and Salon.com, where he was recently the Washington Bureau Chief, and author of 1800 online pieces. He is currently a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. Books by Blumenthal include: The Clinton Wars, The Permanent Campaign, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War, and the recently published, How Bush Rules, Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner). His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the status, in the wake of the Clinton Wars and the 2000 Florida recount, as one of the very rare books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America’s Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online; his Nation article “All Aboard the McCain Express” was featured in Best American Political Writing 2008. Perlstein is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con.

MODERATOR

Stephen Holmes is a Faculty Advisor at the Center on Law and Security and the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. His fields of specialization include the history of liberalism, the disappointments of democratization after communism, and the difficulty of combating terrorism within the limits of liberal constitutionalism. In 2003, he was selected as a Carnegie Scholar. From 1997 to 2000, he was a professor of politics at Princeton. From 1985 to 1997, he was professor of politics and law at the Law School and Political Science Department of the University of Chicago. From 1979 to 1985, he taught at the Department of Government at Harvard University. He was also the editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review from 1993-2003.  He is the author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Yale University Press, 1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Harvard University Press, 1993), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and co-author (with Cass Sunstein) of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (Norton, 1999), and most recently, The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2007).