Jack David & Melanie Kirkpatrick
Monday, August 13, 2018
Topic: North Korea—Perils and Unhappy Options.
Jack David is a senior fellow in national security at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and a trustee of Hudson as well as a trustee of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction and Negotiations Policy from 2004 to 2006. He was responsible for developing and advising on plans and policies relating to nonproliferation and counterproliferation of WMD, including issues related to North Korea and Iran. He is a recipient of the Secretary of Defense Outstanding Public Service Award.
Prior to that he practiced law in New York City for 28 years until 1995. His legal practice focused on representation of foreign and domestic clients in predominantly civil litigation. He also represented foreign and domestic clients on corporate matters, contracts, acquisitions, and business reorganizations. He holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and a law degree from Columbia University.
Melanie Kirkpatrick is a writer-journalist based in Connecticut and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank. She contributes reviews and commentary to various publications, including the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, for which she worked for 30 years. She is the author of Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience (2016) and Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad (2012). WORLD Magazine named Escape from North Koreathe best book of 2013.
At The Wall Street Journal, Melanie was a longtime member of the editorial board. She began her Journal career as a copy editor in Hong Kong, rising to become op-ed editor and then deputy editor of the newspaper’s opinion pages. Early in her career she worked at the Buffalo Courier-Express and at Time-Life Educational Systems in Tokyo, where she free-lanced as a host for an NHK-TV show for children.
She received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto. She was a Gannett Newspaper Foundation Fellow in Asian studies at the University of Hawaii. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a trustee emerita of Princeton in Asia, an internship program in Asia for young graduates of American universities; a member of the advisory board of the Human Freedom Program of the George W. Bush Institute; a member of the Trollope Society; and a director of the America for Bulgaria Foundation.