9/11: Twenty years later (Day 2)

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and founder of Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program. From 2016 to 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. She has worked previously at the Defense Department, the State Department and for several international human rights organizations. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic and Wall Street Journal and she has served as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Foreign Policy. Her most recent books are How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, a New York Times notable selection, and Tangled Up in Blue, which explores her experiences training with the DC Police.

Eric Edelman, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009 after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005–2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Edelman served as U.S. ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs.

Melvyn P. Leffler is the co-chair of the History and Public Policy Program Advisory Board at the Wilson Center and Emeritus Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on the Cold War and on U.S. relations with Europe, including For the Soul of Mankind (2007), which won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, and A Preponderance of Power (1993), which won the Bancroft, Hoover, and Ferrell Prizes. In 2010, he and Odd Arne Westad co-edited the three volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. Along with Jeff Legro and Will Hitchcock, he is co-editor of Shaper Nations: Strategies for a Changing World (2016). Most recently, he published Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015 (2017).

J. Stephen Morrison, the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center, is senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of its Global Health Policy Center. Dr. Morrison writes widely, has directed several high-level commissions, and is a frequent commentator on U.S. foreign policy, global health, Africa, and foreign assistance. He served in the Clinton administration, as committee staff in the House of Representatives, and taught for 12 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin and is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College.

Stephen D. Mull, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, is vice provost for global affairs at the University of Virginia. He has served in a broad range of U.S. national security positions, most recently as acting under secretary for political affairs at the U.S. Department of State, working as the day-to-day manager of overall regional and bilateral policy issues, and overseeing the bureaus for Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Near East, South and Central Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and International Organizations. He served as lead coordinator for Iran Nuclear Implementation from August 2015 until August 2017 and was the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Poland and the Republic of Lithuania. He has been both executive secretary of the State Department and the senior advisor to under secretary of state for political affairs. He has also recently served as resident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

Barbara A. Perry is the Gerald L. Baliles Professor and director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, where she co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program. She has authored or edited 16 books on presidents, First Ladies, the Kennedy family, the Supreme Court, and civil rights and civil liberties. Perry has conducted more than 120 interviews for the George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama Presidential Oral History Projects; participated in the Bill Clinton interviews; directed the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project; and co-directs the Hillary Rodham Clinton Oral History Project. She served as a U.S. Supreme Court fellow and has worked for both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate.

Timothy Recuber is assistant professor of Sociology at Smith College where he focuses on mass media, digital culture and emotions. He is the author of Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America's Decade of Disaster. The book argues that media coverage of the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and the 2008 financial crisis encouraged viewers to empathize with the suffering of others, but in individualistic and short-sighted ways. His next book-length project will examine the ways that digital technologies are changing how we engage with death and dying.

Mara Rudman is the executive vice president for policy at American Progress, where she works with policy teams to create smart strategies and find the path to turn ideas into action and action into results. She served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. Rudman was most recently senior vice president for policy/projects at Business Executives for National Security, and led Quorum Strategies, a geopolitical strategic advisory firm. Her government positions have included serving as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs in the Obama and Clinton administrations, deputy envoy and chief of staff for the Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace at the U.S. Department of State, and assistant administrator for the Middle East at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Marc Selverstone is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. He earned a BA degree in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He co-founded and is the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, which is devoted to sober and serious discussion of "Hard National Security Choices." He is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and a law analyst at NBC News and MSNBC. Wittes is the author with Susan Hennessey of Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office. His previous books include The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones-Confronting A New Age of Threat (2015), coauthored with Gabriella Blum, and Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantanamo (2011). Between 1997 and 2006, Wittes served as an editorial writer for the Washington Post specializing in legal affairs.