President of Brookings Institution to give annual Kruzel Lecture

COLUMBUS -- Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, will give the annual Joseph J. Kruzel Memorial Lecture at noon on Tuesday, Oct. 9, at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave., on the campus of The Ohio State University.  His topic is “Election of the Century: The American Presidency and the World.”

The Brookings Institution is the nation’s oldest think tank devoted to public service through research and education in the social sciences, particularly economics, government, and foreign policy.  Talbott became its president in 2002 after a career in journalism, government and academe.

In academe, Talbott was the founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. In government, he served in the State Department as Ambassador-at-Large, Special Adviser for the new independent states of the former Soviet Union, and Deputy Secretary of State.

Talbott also spent 21 years as a reporter for Time magazine, first covering Eastern Europe, the State Department and the White House, then as Washington bureau chief, editor-at-large, and foreign affairs columnist.

His many books include Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (with Michael Beschloss), Reagan and Gorbachev (with Michael Mandelbaum), Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II, and Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Talbott was educated at Hotchkiss, Yale (B.A., 1968, M.A. Hon., 1976) and Oxford (M.Litt., 1971).

The Kruzel Memorial Lecture is given at the Mershon Center each year in honor of Joseph J. Kruzel, an Ohio State faculty member in Political Science who served in the U.S. Air Force as well as other posts in the federal government. Kruzel was killed in Sarajevo, Bosnia, while serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs.

About the Mershon Center for International Security Studies
The Mershon Center for International Security Studies advances the understanding of national security in a global context by fostering interdisciplinary faculty and student research in three areas of focus: the use of force and diplomacy; the ideas, identities, and decisional processes that affect security; and the institutions that manage violent conflict. The Mershon Center is a unit of the Office of International Affairs at The Ohio State University.