Speaker Biographies

Susan Eisenhower

Senior Fellow and Chairman Emeritus, The Eisenhower Institute

Susan Eisenhower is president of the Eisenhower Group, Inc., which provides strategic counsel on political, business, and public affairs projects. She is a senior director of Stonebridge International, a Washington-based international consulting firm chaired by former national security advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger. She is a distinguished fellow of The Eisenhower Institute, where she has served as both president and chairman.

After more than 20 years in the foreign affairs field, Eisenhower is best known for her work in Russia and the former Soviet Union. She has testified before the Senate Armed Services and Senate Budget Committees on policy toward that region. She is serving her fourth term on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on International Security and Arms Control. In 2000, a year before September 11, she coedited a book, Islam and Central Asia, which carried the prescient subtitle, An Enduring Legacy or an Evolving Threat?

In 2000, the secretary of energy appointed Eisenhower to a blue ribbon task force, the Baker-Cutler Commission, to evaluate U.S.-funded nuclear nonproliferation programs in Russia, and since that time she has served as an advisor on another Department of Energy study. In 2001, after serving two terms on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Advisory Council, she was appointed to the International Space Station (ISS) Management and Cost Evaluation Task Force, which analyzed ISS management and cost overruns. Eisenhower is currently a member of the secretary of energy’s Task Force on Nuclear Energy. She has served as an academic fellow of the International Peace and Security program of Carnegie Corporation of New York, and she is a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, co-chaired by Senators Sam Nunn and Ted Turner.

Within the last 10 years, Eisenhower has written three books; two of which, Breaking Free and Mrs. Ike, have appeared on regional best seller lists. She has also edited four collected volumes on regional security issues—most recently Partners in Space (2004). Her hundreds of op-eds and articles on foreign policy have been published in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Naval Institute’s Proceedings, the London Spectator, and Gannett newspapers. She has provided analysis for CNN International, MSNBC, Nightline, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, This Week with David Brinkley, CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Fox News, and Hardball, as well as National Public Radio and other nationwide television and radio programs.