Truth to Power: A History of the U.S. National Intelligence Council

On Thursday, August 29, 2019, Ambassador Robert Hutchings, the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Chair in National Security and Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Dr. Gregory F. Treverton, Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California, discussed their new book, Truth to Power: A History of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. This talk was co-sponsored by the Intelligence Studies Project, Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Clements Center for National Security, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs Colloquium. For event photographs, click HERE.

BIOGRAPHIES

Robert Hutchings is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Chair in National Security and a Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. He served as Dean of the School from 2010 to 2015. Before coming to UT, he was diplomat in residence at Princeton University, where he also served as assistant dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and as faculty chair of its Master in Public Policy program. His combined academic and diplomatic career has included service as director for European affairs with the National Security Council, special adviser to the Secretary of State with the rank of ambassador, and chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Ambassador Hutchings served earlier in his career as deputy director of Radio Free Europe and on the faculty of the University of Virginia. He is the author of four books, including “American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War,” along with many articles and book chapters on U.S. foreign policy and European affairs. His most recent book, co-edited with Jeremi Suri, is “Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy” (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Gregory F. Treverton is Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. He served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council from September 2014 to January 2017. Earlier, he directed the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security, and before that, its Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center. He also was associate dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, overseeing the writing of America’s National Intelligence Estimates. In addition to RAND, he has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities, has been a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and also Deputy Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.