Leslie H. Gelb is President of the Council on Foreign Relations. a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization devoted to improving America's understanding of foreign policy, since 1993. He is currently a Trustee for The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Tufts University. He is a Board Member of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and an Advisory Board Member for the Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Prior to his tenure as President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Gelb had a distinguished career at The New York Times, where he was a columnist, Deputy Editorial Page Editor and Editor of the Op-Ed Page. He also served as the National Security Correspondent for The Times from 1981 - 1986, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1985.
Mr. Gelb was Senior Advocate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was Consultant to the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. Gelb was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration, serving as Director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, where he received the highest State Department award: the Distinguished Honor Award. He was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1969 to 1973, during which time he was also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He was Director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense from 1967 to 1969, where he also served as Director of the Pentagon Papers Project. While at the Defense Department, Mr. Gelb won the Pentagon's highest award, the Distinguished Service Award.