Richard Stengel

Richard Allen Stengel (born May 2, 1955) is an American editor, author, and former government official. He was Time magazine's 16th managing editor from 2006 to 2013. He was also chief executive of the National Constitution Center from 2004 to 2006 and served as President Obama's Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2014 to 2016. Stengel has written a number of books, including a collaboration with Nelson Mandela on Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. 

Stengel is an on-air analyst at MSNBC, a strategic advisor at Snap Inc., and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. His 2019 book, Information Wars: How We Lost the Battle Against Disinformation and What to Do About It, recounts his time in the State Department countering Russian disinformation and ISIS propaganda. Stengel was born in New York City into a Jewish family and raised in Westchester County. He attended Princeton University and played on the Princeton Tigers basketball team as part of the 1975 National Invitation Tournament. 

He graduated magna cum laude in 1977. After college, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied English and history at Christ Church, Oxford. Stengel joined Time in 1981 and contributed to the magazine through the early and mid-1980s, including articles on South Africa, which he also covered for Rolling Stone magazine. He became a senior writer and essayist for Time, covering both the 1988 and 1996 presidential campaigns.

While working for Time, Stengel also wrote for The New Yorker, The New Republic, Spy, and the New York Times and appeared on television as a commentator. Using his experiences as a journalist as a basis, in 1999, Stengel became a Ferris Professor at Princeton, teaching a course on "Politics and the Press." He was one of the original on-air contributors for MSNBC. Stengel left Time in 1999 to become a senior advisor and chief speechwriter for Bill Bradley, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the 2000 presidential election.

Stengel has authored several books, including January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, A South African Town, a non-fiction work about the lives of three men in rural South Africa, published in 1990, and You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery a popular history of flattery, published in 2000. Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage was released in March 2010 and is based on Stengel's personal interactions with Nelson Mandela. The book drew praise from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, as well as Deepak Chopra and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In 2012, Stengel edited and wrote the lead essay for the book The Constitution: The Essential User's Guide, which explored the relevance of the U.S. Constitution in modern-day events. The book that Stengel is best known for is his collaboration with Nelson Mandela on Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. In 1992, he signed a ghostwriting deal with publishers Little and Brown to work on the book, having first been cleared by the African National Congress as a suitable author. The book was published in 1995 and was praised by the Financial Times, which stated: "Their collaboration produced surely one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century". 

Stengel later served as co-producer of the 1996 documentary film Mandela, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Stengel’s latest book, “Information Wars,” has been praised by Madeleine Albright, Walter Isaacson, and Jon Meacham. It tells the story of his efforts to combat both Russian disinformation and ISIS messaging from the State Department, and the eventual formation of the Global Engagement Center, the one government agency tasked with fighting the global epidemic of disinformation. 

The book’s final chapter details what can be done about disinformation, everything from amending the Communications and Decency Act to make the big platform companies more liable for their content to making media literacy a compulsory subject in high school.