Ending Genocide | Agenda | Bios | Poll Results | Video | Photos | Resources
Hillary Rodham Clinton became the 67th US secretary of state after decades in public service as an advocate, attorney, first lady, and senator from New York. As first lady, she led bipartisan efforts on adoption and foster care, teen pregnancy, and health care for children, and traveled the world as an advocate for human rights and democracy. As senator, she worked to rebuild New York after 9/11, address lasting health concerns of first responders, create economic opportunity, and improve health care for service members and veterans. Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from Wellesley College and Yale Law School. She is married to former President Bill Clinton.
Michael Abramowitz is director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, which leads the institution’s genocide prevention efforts. Previously he worked as a reporter and national editor for the Washington Post. Between 2006 and 2009, he was White House correspondent for the newspaper, covering a variety of subjects, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the crisis in Darfur.
Wolf Blitzer is CNN’s lead political anchor and anchor of The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Known for his in-depth reporting on international news, he has been with the network for more than 20 years. Most recently, he traveled to NATO headquarters in Brussels for an exclusive joint interview with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
Sara J. Bloomfield has led the Museum as director for more than a decade, working to build a global institution that teaches the history and lessons of the Holocaust to audiences worldwide. An adviser to museums around the world, she is a member of the International Auschwitz Council and serves on the board of the International Council of Museums/USA. Recently awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, she is also the recipient of three honorary doctorates. She joined the planning staff of the Museum in 1986 when it was a project in development and served in a variety of roles before becoming director in 1999.
Arwa Damon is a CNN correspondent, covering the uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria in 2011 and a member of the team that won a Peabody Award for its coverage of the Arab Spring. She currently focuses on Syria, and her story on secret clinics in Damascus has been nominated for an Emmy Award. For seven years she covered Iraq for the network and has also been based in southeast Asia. She graduated with honors from Skidmore College in New York. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she spent most of her childhood in Morocco and Turkey and is fluent in Arabic, French, and Turkish.
Christopher A. Kojm became chairman of the National Intelligence Council in July 2009. Previously he was a professor of practice at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs (2007–2009) and a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (2004–2007). He served in 2003–2004 as deputy director of the 9/11 Commission, in 2004–2005 as president of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, and in 2006 as senior adviser to the Iraq Study Group. From 1998 to 2003 he was deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, and from 1984 to 1998 he was a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee under US Representative Lee H. Hamilton.
James M. Lindsay is senior vice president, director of studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he oversees the work of the more than six dozen fellows in its David Rockefeller Studies Program. A leading authority on the American foreign policymaking process, he was the inaugural director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin from 2006 to 2009. He has also served in the foreign policy studies program at the Brookings Institution and taught political science at the University of Iowa. During 1996–97 he was director for global issues and multilateral affairs on the National Security Council. His book with Ivo H. Daalder, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, was awarded the 2003 Lionel Gelber Award.
Strive Masiyiwa first came to international prominence when he fought a landmark constitutional legal battle in Zimbabwe that led to the removal of the monopoly of the state in telecommunications. The case is regarded as one of the key milestones in opening the African telecommunications sector to private capital. Masiyiwa is the founder and chairman of South Africa–based Econet Wireless, a global telecommunications group with operations, investments, and offices in more than 18 countries in Africa and beyond. Active in several nonprofit organizations and a member of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, he lives with his family in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mark Penn is worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a leading global public relations and public affairs agency, and CEO of Penn Schoen Berland, a strategic research firm. He has served as a senior strategic adviser to leaders such as Bill Gates, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and President Bill Clinton. A White House pollster for six years to President Clinton and a key adviser in his 1996 reelection, Penn has helped to elect over 25 leaders in the United States, Asia, Latin America, and Europe and has advised a number of Fortune 100 CEOs, including Bill Ford and Sir Howard Stringer. He is the author of the 2007 best-selling book Microtrends, a look at the small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes, and wrote a recurring Microtrends column for the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
Dana Priest is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post and was its intelligence and Pentagon correspondent for over a decade. She has documented the proliferation of counterterrorism agencies and the increased importance of special operations forces in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and has traveled with Army Special Forces in Colombia, Nigeria, and Kosovo and with infantry units on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. The recipient of numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, she is coauthor of the best-selling book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New America Security State (2011) and The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (2004). She holds a BA in political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Peter Schwartz is senior vice president for global government relations and strategic planning for Salesforce.com, directing policy and politics throughout the world and managing the organization’s ongoing strategic conversation. Prior to joining Salesforce, he was cofounder and chairman of Global Business Network, a partner of the Monitor Group, a family of professional services firms devoted to enhancing client competitiveness. An internationally renowned futurist and business strategist, he specializes in scenario planning, working with corporations, governments, and institutions to create alternative perspectives of the future and develop robust strategies for a changing and uncertain world. From 1982 to 1986, he headed scenario planning for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies in London.
Sarah Sewall is an international security expert who has pioneered the field of civilian protection. She teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, serves on the Defense Policy Board, and is the 2012 Minerva Chair at the US Naval War College. She founded the Mass Atrocity Response Operations Project, for which she developed a military planning handbook and catalyzed US government development of related doctrine. She also directed the Obama Transition’s National Security Agency Review process and was a senior foreign policy adviser to candidate Obama. Previously, she served as director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, as the inaugural deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance, and as senior foreign policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell.
Timothy Snyder is the Bird White Housum professor of history at Yale University. Educated at Brown, Oxford, and Harvard, he relies upon research in ten European languages to maintain specializations in the origins of modern politics and the conditions of mass killing. His publications include six award-winning books of European history, including The Reconstruction of Nations, Sketches from a Secret War, The Red Prince, and Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, which has been published in 25 languages. He is at work on Global Holocaust, an interpretation of the causes of the Nazi policy of annihilation, which concludes with policy recommendations for the present day.
Richard Williamson is a nonresident senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and a principal in the consulting firm Salisbury Strategies LLP. His work focuses on human rights, multilateral diplomacy, nuclear nonproliferation, and post-conflict reconstruction. Previously he served as US special envoy to Sudan, as ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs, and as ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights, all under President George W. Bush. He also served in several other senior foreign policy positions under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, including as assistant secretary of state for international organizations at the Department of State and as an assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
