Upcoming Speakers
Thomas Blanton
October 9, 2023
Topic: The Downsides of Government Secrecy
Tom Blanton is the director since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University. He won the 2004 Emmy Award for individual achievement in news and documentary research, and on behalf of the Archive received the George Polk Award in 2000 for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy.” His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association’s James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors. The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.” His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive’s online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive’s more than 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.
Heather Cox Richardson: Free Public Event
Thursday, October 26 at 6PM at THE CAMDEN OPERA HOUSE
Topic: Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College. She has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is the cohost of the Vox Media podcast, Now & Then.
Her most recent book is Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, forthcoming from Viking (on sale September 26, 2023). Many of us know Professor Richardson best from her Substack blog, Letters From an American.
Please join us for this free public event, sponsored by The Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations. The format for the evening is “A Conversation with Heather Cox Richardson,” with the audience invited to participate. Our moderator will be Forum member, Jo Dondis. The event will take place at the Camden Opera House, from 6-7PM. Doors open at 5:15PM.
Admission is gratis but you must be registered in advance to attend. Space is limited. Registration opens on October 17 at 9AM. You can register beginning then at:
Camden Opera House Events Page
Ambassador Nathaniel Fick
December 11, 2023
Topic: Cyberspace and Digital Policy
Nathaniel C. Fick was sworn in on September 21, 2022 as the inaugural U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy.
Prior to joining the State Department, Ambassador Fick was a technology executive and entrepreneur. He was CEO of the cybersecurity software company Endgame from 2012 through its acquisition by Elastic in 2019. Thereafter, he led Elastic’s information security business globally. Ambassador Fick spent nearly a decade as an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, working with management teams to build technology businesses. In 2018, he was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business,” and Endgame was selected by Forbes as one of the “100 Best Cloud Companies in the World.”
From 2009 to 2012, Ambassador Fick was CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a national security research organization in Washington. Earlier in his career, he served as a Marine Corps infantry and reconnaissance officer, including combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. His book about that experience, One Bullet Away, was a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post “Best Book of the Year,” and one of the Military Times‘s “Best Military Books of the Decade.”
Ambassador Fick graduated with high honors in Classics from Dartmouth College and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Ambassador Ronald Lehman
January 8, 2024
Topic: Technology and the End of the Cold War -- and the End of the End of the Cold War
The Honorable Ronald F. Lehman II is the Counselor to the Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). For many years, he was the Director of the Center for Global Security Research at LLNL.
Ambassador Lehman has been the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Assistant Secretary for International Security Policy in the Department of Defense, Ambassador and Chief Negotiator on Strategic Offensive Arms (START I), and Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. He has also served on the National Security Council staff as a Senior Director, in the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary, on the Senior Professional Staff of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, and served in Vietnam as a commissioned officer in the United States Army. In the past he has served as the Chair of the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee (TRAC), on the Presidential Advisory Board on Proliferation Policy, on the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board, as chair of the NATO High Level Group, on the governing board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and as a U.S. representative to a number of United Nations disarmament and review conferences.
Ambassador Lehman co-chaired (with David Franz) the National Academy of Sciences’ study on the future of Cooperative Threat Reduction and formerly co-chaired (with Ash Carter) the Policy Advisory Group on nonproliferation for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was on the Defense Science Board Task Forces on Globalization and Security, on Tritium, on Global Strike, and on Defense against Biological Weapons. He is served on the National Research Council Committee on U.S. Air Force Strategic Deterrence Military Capabilities in the 21st Century and served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Science, Technology, and Health Aspects of the Foreign Policy Agenda of the United States and on its Committee on Alternative Technologies to Replace Anti-Personnel Landmines. He was detailed to the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration as counterterrorism coordinator after the September 11, 2001, attacks. For the Department of Energy he was the U.S.-Snezhinsk Working Group Co-Chair for the Joint Russian-American Steering Committee on the Nuclear Cities Initiative. He served on the advisory panel for USSTRATCOM’s Global Innovation and Strategy Center. He was on the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on the U.S. Nuclear Posture. He was a Public Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.
He received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University (1975) and his B.A. from Claremont McKenna College (1968).