Discover the Best Books Written by Strobe Talbott

Nelson Strobridge Talbott III is an American foreign policy analyst focused on Russia. He was associated with Time magazine, and a diplomat who served as the Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001. He was president of Brookings Institution from 2002 to 2017. Talbott was born in Dayton, Ohio, to Helen Josephine (Large) and Nelson Strobridge "Bud" Talbott II. He attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and graduated in 1968 from Yale University, where he had been chairman of the Yale Daily News, a position whose previous incumbents include Henry Luce, William F. Buckley, and Joe Lieberman. 

5He was awarded Yale's Alpheus Henry Snow Prize. He was also a member of the Scholar of the House program in 1967–68, belonged to a society of juniors and seniors called Saint Anthony Hall and elected to the exclusive Elizabethan Club. He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with fellow Rhodes Scholar Robert Reich and friend David E. Kendall, rallied their friends Bill and Hillary Clinton to help the Texas campaign to elect George McGovern as president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 volumes, 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott served in the U.S. government. He was appointed Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States from 1993 to 1994, to mitigate the consequences of the Soviet breakup. He was then appointed to the second highest ranking position in the U.S. State Department as Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001. After leaving government, he was briefly the Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

Talbott was the sixth president of the Brookings Institution in Washington from 2002 to 2017. He helped raise more than $650 million in support of independent policy research and analysis. At Brookings, he was responsible for formulating policies, recommending projects, approving publications and selecting staff, focusing on Eastern Europe, Russia, and nuclear arms control. On January 31, 2017, Talbott announced his resignation from the Brookings Institution. 

The resignation was later retracted, but in October 2017, he was succeeded by General John R. Allen. In December 2011, Talbott returned to government service as chair of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He was on the advisory board of the DC non-profit America Abroad Media and holds leadership positions in other organizations such as the Aspen Institute and the American Academy of Diplomacy.