Past Speakers

Karen Elliott House

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Karen Elliot House

American journalist

Karen Elliott House retired in 2006 as Publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Senior Vice President of Dow Jones & Company, and a member of the company’s executive committee. She is a broadly experienced business executive with particular expertise and experience in international affairs stemming from a distinguished career as a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and editor.

From 1989 to 2002 she served as Vice President International and then President International of Dow Jones, responsible for The Wall Street Journal’s print editions in Asia and Europe as well as for magazine and television ventures overseas. These included representing Dow Jones on the boards of CNBC Asia and Europe, the Far Eastern Economic Review and Vedomosti, a publishing partnership in Russia. House served as The Wall Street Journal’s publisher from 2002 until her retirement, and in that role was responsible for all news, editorial, sales and other business functions of The Wall Street Journal and its editions around the world. Her journalism awards include a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the Middle East (1984), two Overseas Press Club awards for coverage of the Middle East and of Islam and the Edwin M. Hood award for Excellence in Diplomatic Reporting for a series on Saudi Arabia (1982).

House has served and continues to serve on multiple non-profit boards including the Rand Corp., where she is vice-chairman, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, the German-American Council, and Boston University. She also is a member of the advisory board of the College of Communication at the University of Texas. Currently, she is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future, published in September 2012 by Knopf.

Twitter: @khouse200

Sherry Hormann

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Sherry Hormann

Film director

Sherry Hormann is a director and writer, known for Desert Flower (2009), which tells the fascinating story of Waris Dirie’s journey from nomad, to supermodel, to UN ambassador; 3096 Days (2013); Guys and Balls (2004); The Pursuit of Unhappines (2012); and A Regular Woman (2019).

Matthew Hoh

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Matthew Hoh

Iraq war veteran

Matthew Hoh is the director of the Afghanistan Study Group, a network of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. A former State Department official, Matthew resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan over U.S. strategic policy in Afghanistan in 2009.

Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matthew served in Iraq, first in 2004-2005 in Salah ad Din Province with a State Department reconstruction and governance team, and then in 2006-2007 in Anbar Province as a Marine Corps company commander. When not deployed, Matthew worked on Afghanistan and Iraq policy and operations issues at the Pentagon and State Department from 2002-2008. Matthew’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and his resignation letter has been cited as an Essential Document by the Council on Foreign Relations. Matthew was recently named the 2010 Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling.

Michael Hirsh

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Michael Hirsh

American journalist

Michael Hirsh is the national editor for Politico, and has previously served as chief correspondent for National Journal and as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek. Hirsh was also Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994.

Hirsh has appeared many times as a commentator on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and National Public Radio. He has written for the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, and Washington Monthly, and authored two books, Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future over to Wall Street and At War with Ourselves: Why America is Squandering its Chance to Build a Better World. Hirsh has received numerous awards, including the Overseas Press Club award for best magazine reporting from abroad in 2001 and for Newsweek’s coverage of the war on terror, which also won a National Magazine Award.

Hirsh spoke at The Common Good in 2010.

Twitter: @michaelphirsh

Katrina vanden Heuvel

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Katrina VandeN Heuvel

Editor, publisher, partial owner of The Nation

Katrina Vanden Heuvel is the editor, publisher, and partial owner of the magazine The Nation in which she has been the magazine’s editor since 1995. She is a frequent guest on numerous television programs and is a self-described liberal and progressive.

In 1989, Vanden Heuvel was promoted to The Nation’s editor-at-large position, responsible for its coverage of the USSR. In 1990, she co-founded Vy i My (“You and We”), a quarterly feminist journal linking American and Russian women. In 1995, Vanden Heuvel was made editor of The Nation. Vanden Heuvel’s blog at The Nation is called “Editor’s Cut.” She also writes a column for the Washington Post op-ed page. She is the co-editor of Taking Back America—And Taking Down The Radical Right and editor of The Dictionary of Republicanisms. She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers and editor of The Nation: 1865-1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.

She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC’s This Week, and also on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe. She received many awards for public service from New York Civil Liberties Union’s Joseph Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right to Privacy; the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Voices of Peace Award; and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s Justice in Action Award

Katrina Vanden Heuvel was hosted by The Common Good in 2010: Election Insurrection: The Mid-Term Elections 2010.

Twitter: @KatrinaNation

James Harmon

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James Harmon

Investment banker

James Harmon is Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Caravel Management LLC, the investment manager of the Caravel Fund (International) Ltd., an emerging and frontier markets fund that was launched in 2004. In 2004, Harmon was elected Chairman of the Board of the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global policy and research institution.

Harmon is the Chairman of the Egyptian American Enterprise Fund, a private corporation seeded by U.S. Government funds to promote the development of the Egyptian private sector with a particular focus on small-and medium-sized enterprises. Harmon served as the Chairman, President and CEO of the Export-Import Bank of the United States from 1997- 2001. Ex-Im Bank assists in financing the export of US goods and services to international markets. Prior to Ex-Im Bank, Harmon was Chairman and CEO of the investment bank Schroder Wertheim & Co. Harmon was the U.S. Representative on the High Level Panel for Infrastructure Investment 2011, a panel appointed by the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the G20. Harmon is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Trustee Emeritus of Brown University and Barnard College.

Harmon spoke at The Common Good Forum 2015 as part of the panel “Global Opportunities and Challenges: Charting Growth Around the Globe.”

Twitter: @james_A_Harmon

Chris Hayes

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Chris Hayes

American journalist

Christopher Hayes is an editor-at-large of The Nation and host of Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. From 2010 to 2011, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. From 2008-2010, he was a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times.

Since 2002, he has written about political culture and political economy. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian, and The Chicago Reader.

His book about the crisis of authority in American life, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, will be published by Crown in June 2012.

The Common Good hosted Hayes in July of 2012: Chris Hayes: Getting Past the “Fail Decade”.

Twitter: @chrislhayes

Jane Hamsher

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Jane Hamsher

American film producer, author, blogger

Jane Hamsher is a U.S. film producer, author, and blogger, best known as the author of Killer Instinct, and as the founder and publisher of the politically progressive blog FireDogLake (2004 – the present). She also co-produced the subsequent films Apt Pupil (1998), Permanent Midnight (1998), and From Hell (2001). A contributor to The Huffington Post, she posts also in liberal Websites and political magazines, such as AlterNet and The American Prospect.

FireDogLake (abbreviated FDL) is a US collaborative blog which primarily specializes in covering news from a left-progressive/left-liberal stance. Firedoglake won a 2005 Koufax Award for “Best Series” for its detailed coverage of the Plame affair, while being in close contention for “Best New Blog” and “Best Group Blog”. In late 2005, Hamsher expanded FDL into a group blog.

The Common Good hosted Hamsher in 2010: Election Insurrection: The Mid-Term Elections 2010.

Twitter: @janehamsher

Mark Halperin

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Mark Halperin

Co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics

Mark Halperin is co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics, which leads Bloomberg’s political and policy coverage, including news, analysis, commentary, narrative, data analytics across all platforms. He is also a regular contributor to MSNBC’s Morning Joe and a frequent guest on Charlie Rose.

Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2014, Halperin served as editor-at-large and senior political analyst for TIME, covering politics, elections and government for the magazine and TIME.com. He was also the creator and author of TIME.com’s The Page, a news and analysis tip sheet reporting on current political stories, campaign ads, TV clips, videos and campaign reactions from every news source, along with Halperin’s own analysis. Prior to joining TIME in April 2007, Halperin worked at ABC News for nearly 20 years, where he covered five presidential elections and served as political director from November 1997 to April 2007. In that role, he was responsible for political reporting and planning for the network’s television, radio and Internet political coverage. He also appeared regularly on ABC News TV and radio as a correspondent and analyst, contributing commentary and reporting during election night coverage, presidential inaugurations and State of the Union speeches. Additionally, Halperin founded and edited the online publication The Note on abcnews.com, which was characterized as the most influential daily tip sheet in American politics by publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair.

He is the co-author of New York Times bestsellers Double Down: Game Change 2012 (2013) and Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010); author of The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President (2007); and co-author of The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 (2006).

Amidst multiple allegations of workplace sexual harassment and misconduct at his prior job at ABC News, Halperin was fired by both Showtime Networks and NBC News at the end of October 2017. Since then, he has attempted to make amends publicly.

Twitter: @MarkHalperin

Senator Chuck Hagel

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Senator Chuck Hagel

Former United States Senator from Nebraska

Charles Timothy “Chuck” Hagel is a former United States Senator from Nebraska.  A member of the Republican Party, he was first elected in 1996 and was reelected in 2002. In 2009, he was elected as Chairman of the Atlantic Council.

Hagel is a Vietnam War veteran, having served in the United States Army infantry, attaining the rank of Sergeant (E-5) from 1967-1968. While serving during the Vietnam War, he received the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, two Purple Hearts, an Army Commendation Medal, and the Combat Infantryman Badge.

Hagel was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; and Intelligence Committees. He Chaired the Foreign Relations International Economic Policy, Export, and Trade Promotion Subcommittee, the Banking Committee’s International Trade and Finance, and Securities Subcommittees. Hagel also served as the Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the Senate Climate Change Observer Group. Hagel is also the author of the recently published America: Our Next Chapter, a straight forward examination of the current state of our nation.

Hagel spoke at a Meet & Greet hosted by The Common Good in 2007.

Robert Greenwald

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Robert Greenwald

Producer, director, political activist

Robert Greenwald is a producer, director and political activist, and the founder and president of Brave New Films. Under Greenwald’s direction, Brave New Films has produced a series of short political videos, including the Fox Attacks and Real McCain campaigns. In total, Brave New Film’s short videos have been viewed over 56 million times in the past two years, inspired hundreds of thousands of people to take action and forced pressing issues into the mainstream media.

In addition, Greenwald is the director/producer of several documentaries: Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004). Greenwald also executive produced a trilogy of political documentaries: Unprecedented: The 2000 Election (2002), Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2003), and Unconstitutional (2004).

Prior to his documentary work, Greenwald produced and/or directed more than 55 television movies, miniseries and feature films. Greenwald’s films have garnered 25 Emmy nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, the Peabody Award and the Robert Wood Johnson Award. He was awarded the 2002 Producer of the Year Award by the American Film Institute. He has been honored for his activism by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the Liberty Hill Foundation; the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; Physicians for Social Responsibility; Consumer Attorney’s Association of Los Angeles; Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and the Office of the Americas.

The Common Good hosted Greenwald in September of 2009: Screening and Discussion with: Robert Greenwald and Jim Miller.

Twitter: @robertgreenwald

Vice President Al Gore

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Vice President Al Gore

45th Vice President of the United States

Former Vice President Al Gore is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management. He is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a member of Apple, Inc.’s board of directors. Gore spends the majority of his time as chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a non-profit devoted to solving the climate crisis.

Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980 and 1982 and the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years.

He is the author of the bestsellers Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and most recently, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. He is the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary and is the co-recipient, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Twitter: @algore

Alex Gibney

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Alex Gibney

Writer, producer, director

Alex Gibney has been called “the most important documentarian of our time” by Esquire Magazine and “one of America’s most successful and prolific documentary filmmakers” by The New York Times.

Gibney has won an Academy Award, multiple Emmy Awards, the Grammy Award, several Peabody Awards, the DuPont-Columbia, The Independent Spirit, The Writers Guild of America Awards, and others. Gibney was honored with the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award in 2013 and the first ever Christopher Hitchens Prize in 2015.

Gibney has made many films, including Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Taxi to the Dark Side, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. He has also made several shows, including Parched and Dirty Money. He executive produced The Looming Tower, a drama series based on Lawrence Wright’s bestseller The Looming Tower that premiered on Hulu in February 2018.

The Common Good hosted Mr. Gibney in November of 2010: Screening of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

Twitter: @alexgibneyfilm

William Galston

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William Galston

Author, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program

William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow. He is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland.

A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy. Galston is the author of eight books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books are Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2002), The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), and Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Galston has appeared on all the principal television networks and is a frequent commentator on NPR. He also writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal.

Galston spoke at The Common Good Forum & American Spirit Awards 2016.

Twitter: @BillGalston

Professor Uzi Rabi

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Professor Uzi Rabi

Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies

Professor Uzi Rabi is the Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His most recent publication is the edited volume International Intervention in Local Conflicts (I.B. Tauris 2010).

He is the director of the annual Tel Aviv University Workshop in which scholars from around the world visit Israel for a ten-day seminar on the geopolitics of Israel and its neighbors, and the history of the region and its significance in contemporary world affairs. Rabi is also the author of numerous publications, academic articles, and book reviews including: The Emergence of States in a Tribal Society: Oman Under Sa’id bin Taymur, 1932- 1970 (Sussex Academic Press 2006); Saudi Arabia, An Oil Kingdom in the Labyrinth of Religion and Politics (The Open University, 2007) in Hebrew; and Iran’s Time (HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2008) in Hebrew.

Previously, Dr. Rabi served as the vice-director of the S. Daniel Abraham for Regional and International Studies at TAU. In addition, he participated in the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University as a senior researcher. Dr. Rabi is regularly invited by the Israeli Knesset to deliver updates and briefs on current developments in the Middle East.

Dr. Rabi was hosted by The Common Good in 2011: The Changing Face of the Middle East with Professor Uzi Rabi.

Twitter: @uzi_rabi

Suzanne Ehlers

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Suzanne Ehlers

President and CEO of Population Action International

Suzanne Ehlers, President & CEO of Population Action International, has worked for the last 15 years to promote women’s health, rights and empowerment across the globe. She has been with PAI for over seven years, most recently leading the strategic direction of campaigns as Vice President of International Advocacy. Suzanne’s work focused largely on building and supporting advocacy capacity among indigenous NGOs; strengthening reproductive health and HIV integration; leveraging new monies for reproductive health supplies; and fostering innovative approaches to coalition building.

Under Suzanne’s leadership as President, PAI is leading U.S. and global advocacy for family planning; providing key technical and financial resources to partners in Africa, South Asia and Latin America; and building the case for women’s health as the connective tissue that holds together a host of other development concerns, from the environment to state stability to food security.

For the last two years, Suzanne has served on the U.S. government delegation to United Nations Commission meetings. She also sits on the Steering Committee of the Bangkok-based Asia Pacific Alliance; until recently, she chaired the board of the Janelia Family Foundation. She is an Environmental Leadership Liaison for Rachel’s Network, a network of women leaders “dedicated to the stewardship of the earth.”

Twitter: @SuzannePAI

Lisa Edelstein

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Lisa Edelstein

American actress, playwright

Lisa Edelstein is an American actress and playwright. She wrote, composed and starred in an original musical called Positive Me in response to the growing AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and has held many roles in television

From 2004 to 2011, she played Dr. Lisa Cuddy, the Dean of Medicine at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital on Fox’s TV series House, M.D. In June 2011, it was revealed that she would join the cast of The Good Wife, on which she plays Celeste Serano. In 2011, she won the People’s Choice Award for Best Drama Actress in a TV Series for her portrayal of Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House, M.D.

Twitter: @LisaEdelstein

Mitch Draizin

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Mitch Draizin

Founder and President of Longview Capital Advisors

Mitch Draizin is the founder and President of Longview Capital Advisors, which serves as investment and mortgage bankers to New York Metro based real estate developers, owners and owner-occupiers.  

Draizin serves on multiple national boards focused on Education, LGBT and Progressive issues, and is actively engaged in identifying and mentoring future leaders primarily in the Progressive and LGBT communities. He is a member of the Board of the Congressional Award Foundation and the Truman National Security Project-CNP where he sponsors the Mitchell Draizin/Philippe Brugere-Trelat Truman/CNP Political Fellowship.

Matthew Dowd

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Matthew Dowd

American Political Consultant

Matthew John Dowd is an American political consultant who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign. In December 2007, he was introduced on ABC’s Good Morning America as its new political contributor. He also appears on the same network’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Dowd began his political career as a Democrat, working for, among others, Texas Lt. Governor Bob Bullock. In 1999, he switched parties to become a Republican. During the 2002 election, Dowd was a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee. During the 2004 Presidential election, Dowd was chief strategist for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, but he would later leave the Bush administration due to frustrations regarding the Iraq War.

The Common Good hosted Dowd in 2010: Election Insurrection: The Mid-Term Elections 2010.

Twitter: @matthewjdowd

Fats Domino

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Fats Domino ✝

Musician

Fats Domino was part of many of the early touring rock ‘n’ roll package shows that “barnstormed” the country and popularized the new music.

No other veteran R&B artist of his era would come close to equaling his long-term impact on rock ‘n’ roll, as evidenced by the wide variety of artists covering his songs, from Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Ricky Nelson and Ike & Tina Turner to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Sheryl Crow, T-Rex, Los Lobos, and Cheap Trick. A prominent figure in the musical world, Fats Domino secured his legacy as an irreplaceable rock ‘n’ roll pioneer of the 1950’s.

Domino became missing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. His home was one of the epicenters of Katrina’s wrath, but he was eventually rescued from his flooded home.

Mr. Domino was hosted by The Common Good in 2007: Hurricane Katrina Relief and Music.