The New Albany Lecture Series - A National Security Discussion

The New Albany Lecture Series brings together leading authorities on national security, Ambassador Susan Rice and Admiral James Stavridis USN (Ret.), in a discussion moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Sanger.

Ambassador Susan E. Rice
Domestic Policy Advisor, U.S. National Security Advisor, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Ambassador Susan E. Rice most recently served as Assistant to the President and Domestic Policy Advisor in the Biden Administration. As Director of the Domestic Policy Council from January 2021-May 2023, she drove the formulation and implementation of President Biden’s domestic policy agenda. Rice’s responsibilities in domestic policy spanned a vast array of issues, ranging from health care, mental health, substance use, human services, and veterans affairs to immigration, urban and rural policy, Native Affairs, LGBTQ+ issues, disability policy, racial justice and equity, artificial intelligence and on-line safety and privacy, diversity and inclusion, criminal justice, gun policy, democracy and voting rights, education, hunger and nutrition, housing, homelessness, and combatting hate-fueled violence.

Rice played a leading role in many critical Biden Administration accomplishments, including: crafting the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism; devising and implementing the National Mental Health Strategy; making historic investments in child care, public education, Pell Grants, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities as well as other minority-serving institutions; greatly expanding access to affordable healthcare; enacting and implementing the American Rescue Plan Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and gun violence prevention legislation; and embedding equity in the work of the federal government.

Rice served as President Obama’s U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and a member of the cabinet as well as the National Security Advisor from 2009-2017. She is the only person ever to have served as both National Security Advisor and Domestic Policy Advisor. Rice is also a New York Times best-selling author of Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, a memoir which recalls pivotal moments from her upbringing and dynamic career on the front lines of American foreign policy.

Rice was the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs, and Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping at the National Security Council under President Clinton from 1993-2001.

Ambassador Rice received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her B.A. with honors in History from Stanford University. A native of Washington, DC, Ambassador Rice is married and has two children.

James Stavridis USN (Ret.) Biography
16th Supreme Allied Commander, NATO; New York Times Bestselling
A Florida native, Jim Stavridis attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and spent 37 years in the Navy, rising to the rank of 4-star Admiral. Among his many commands were four years as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, where he oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and counter piracy off the coast of Africa. He also commanded US Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations through Latin America for nearly three years. He was the longest serving Combatant Commander in recent US history. Following his military career, he served for five years as the 12th Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

In the course of his career in the Navy, he served as senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. He led the Navy’s premier operational think tank for innovation, Deep Blue, immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Admiral Stavridis was promoted directly from 1-star rank to 3-star rank in 2004.

He won the Battenberg Cup for commanding the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet and the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational leadership, along with more than 50 US and international medals and decorations, including 28 from foreign nations. He also commanded a Destroyer Squadron and a Carrier Strike Group, both in combat.

 In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Secretary Hillary Clinton, and subsequently invited to Trump Tower to discuss a cabinet position with President Donald Trump.

He earned a PhD from The Fletcher School at Tufts, winning the Gullion prize as outstanding student in his class in 1983, as well as academic honors from the National and Naval War Colleges as a distinguished student. He speaks Spanish and French.

Admiral Stavridis has published thirteen books on leadership, character, risk, the oceans, maritime affairs, and Latin America, as well as hundreds of articles in leading journals. An active user of social networks, he has tens of thousands of connections on the social networks. His TED talk on 21st century security in 2012 has close to one million views. He tweeted the end of combat operations in the Libyan NATO intervention. Two of his most popular books are the novel 2034: A Novel of the Next World War which was a New York Times bestseller and is being published in 22 languages; and To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and The Crucible of Decision. His most recent book is 2054 which is about artificial intelligence and geopolitics.

Admiral Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News.

He is happily married to Laura, and they have two daughters – one working at Google and the other a Nurse Practitioner and former naval officer, both married to physicians.

David Sanger
Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner
NYT White House and National Security Correspondent
Bestselling Author, The Perfect Weapon and New Cyber Wars
Pulitzer-winning insights on cyber and national security
When readers of the New York Times look to understand the swirling dynamics of wars, diplomacy, cyber conflict and geopolitics, they look for the byline of one of the paper’s most senior correspondents: David E. Sanger, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and White House and National Security Correspondent. Over a 40-year career at the Times, Sanger has become known for the depth of his sources in the world of national security, his painstaking reporting and research, and his in-depth investigations into the complex events of our time.

And his reach goes far beyond the Times. He is a CNN contributor on national security and politics. He is the bestselling author of four books — The Inheritance, Confront and Conceal, The Perfect Weapon, and, most recently, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, to be released April 2024. Sanger also teaches national security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where the class he conducts with Graham Allison, “Central Challenges in American National Security, Strategy and the Press,’’ is among the most popular at the school.

His book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age is an incisive look into how a new era of cyber conflict has changed the national security landscape, providing new ways to influence national elections, conduct sabotage, and execute short-of-war operations. The Emmy-nominated HBO documentary of the same name, directed by John Maggio, takes viewers deep into the cyber battles of the current age, interviewing current and former military and intelligence officials, while conducting new, on-the-ground reporting from the front lines of the cyber wars.

In 2022, Sanger teamed up with Maggio and HBO again to executive produce Year One, a documentary chronicling President Biden’s first year struggling to rebuild American democracy at home and alliances abroad.

In 2016, Sanger was a key member of the Times team that examined Russia’s interference in the presidential election — part of his broader coverage of nation-states’ use of cyber power. That investigation was part of a series of stories that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Several years previously, it was Sanger’s investigation that broke the details of the “Olympic Games,’’ the federal government’s codename for the secret cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear program mounted by the United States and Israel: one of the defining moments of the early cyber age. The story of how two Presidents guided that attack was part of Sanger’s book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. The book sent shockwaves around the globe and was called an “astonishingly revealing insider’s account” by Foreign Affairs. The docu-thriller, Zero Days, an Alex Gibney film about the secret effort to sabotage Iran’s program, tells the story of how Sanger reported on one of the country’s most clandestine operations.

At the Times, Sanger’s previous investigative work led to Pulitzers for the investigation into the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster and into Chinese technology investment in the United States. His coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises won the Weintal Prize, one of the highest honors for diplomatic reporting. He also won the White House Correspondents’ Association Aldo Beckman prize for his coverage of the American presidency.