STROBE TALBOTT

Strobe Talbott has been Deputy Secretary of State since February 22, 1994. He assumed that post after serving for a year as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States (NIS).

Mr. Talbott entered government after 21 years as a journalist for TIME. He last position there was the magazine's Editor-at-Large and foreign-affairs columnist. Prior to that, he was Washington Bureau Chief for five years. His earlier assignments for TIME were Diplomatic Correspondent (1977-84), White House correspondent during the Ford Administration (1975-76), State Department correspondent when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State (1974-75), and Eastern Europe correspondent for two years in the early 1970s.

Mr. Talbott is the author of several books on diplomacy and U.S.-Soviet relations. He translated and edited two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, published in 1970 and 1974. He wrote a series of three books on U.S.-Soviet arms control: Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II (1979), Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (1984), and Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (1988). He is also the author of The Russians and Reagan (1984) and the co-author, with Michael Mandelbaum, of Reagan and Gorbachev (1987) and, with Michael R. Bechloss, At The Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of The Cold War (1993).

Mr. Talbott twice won the Edward Weintal Prize for distinguished reporting on foreign affairs and diplomacy in 1980 and 1985. His contributions were also cited in three Overseas Press Club Awards to TIME, in 1982, 1987, and 1989. As Deputy Secretary, he has continued to write occasional articles - for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Slate.

Mr. Talbott served as a trustee of Yale University and the Hotchkiss School and as a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Council on Foreign Relations, and The Aspen Strategy Group. A native of Dayton, Ohio, he was educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, graduating in 1968. Following his graduation, he spent three years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Mr. Talbott is married to Brooke Shearer; they have two sons.

Talbott's keynote speech at the Stanford Conference:

Gogol’s Troika:
The Case for Strategic Patience In a Time of Troubles

(for the text of the speech click here)