Name	Lawrence Summers
Office	8th Director of the National Economic Council
Deputy	Diana FarrellJason Furman
Term start	January 20, 2009
Term end	December 31, 2010
Predecessor	Keith Hennessey
Successor	Gene Sperling
Office2	27th President of Harvard University
Term start2	July 1, 2001
Term end2	June 20, 2006
Predecessor2	Neil Rudenstine
Successor2	Derek Bok (Acting)
Office3	71st Secretary of the Treasury of the United States
President3	Bill Clinton
Term start3	July 2, 1999
Term end3	January 20, 2001
Predecessor3	Robert Rubin
Successor3	Paul O'Neill
Office4	United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury
President4	Bill Clinton
Term start4	1995
Term end4	1999
Predecessor4	Frank N. Newman
Successor4	Stuart E. Eizenstat
Office5	Chief Economist of the World Bank
Term start5	1991
Term end5	1993
Predecessor5	Stanley Fischer
Successor5	Michael Bruno
Birth date	November 30, 1954
Birth place	New Haven, Connecticut
Party	Democratic Party
Spouse	Elisa New
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyHarvard University
Profession	AcademicEconomist
Religion	Judaism
Signature	Lawrence H Summers sig.jpg
Footnotes	"There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system" — Larry Summers, Oct. 16, 2009 }}

Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist. He served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama until November 2010. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in several fields of economics.

Summers also served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty that resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end," and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization.

Summers has also been criticized for the economic policies he advocated as Treasury Secretary and in later writings. In 2009, he was tapped by President Obama to be the director of the White House National Economic Council.

Family and education

Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, into a Jewish family, the son of two economists, Robert Summers and Anita Summers of (Romanian-Jewish ancestry), who are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of Robert Summers, who, following an older brother's example, changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (Anita Summers's brother). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.

At age 16, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally intended to study physics but soon switched to economics (S.B., 1975). He was also an active member of the MIT debating team. He attended Harvard University as a graduate student (Ph.D., 1982). In 1983, at age 28, Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. It was also during this time that Summers was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He underwent treatment and has since remained cancer free. He was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987. Summers has three children (older twin daughters Ruth and Pamela and son Harry) with his first wife, Victoria Perry. In December 2005, Summers married English professor Elisa New, who has three daughters (Yael, Orli and Maya) from a previous marriage. He currently owns two houses, one in Washington, D.C. and one in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Career

Academic economist

As a researcher, Summers has made important contributions in many areas of economics, primarily public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Some of Summers's early papers concluded that corporate and capital gains taxes are an inefficient form of taxation. Cutting the capital gains tax rate, Summers found, could help the economy grow. Later, while working in the Reagan and Clinton White Houses, Summers was able to lobby successfully for cuts in both corporate and capital gains taxes. One of Summers's prominent findings in labor economics is that unemployment insurance and welfare payments are a major contributor to unemployment, and therefore should be scaled back.

Summers has also worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history and development economics. His work generally emphasizes the analysis of empirical economic data in order to answer well-defined questions (for example: Does saving respond to after-tax interest rates? Are the returns from stocks and stock portfolios predictable? Are most of those who receive unemployment benefits only transitorily unemployed? etc.) For his work he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association. In 1987 he was the first social scientist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. Summers is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Public official

Summers was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan in 1982–1983. He also served as an economic adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.

Chief Economist at the World Bank

Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993.

As Chief Economist, Summers stated in a 1991 interview: ''“There are no... limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn't a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs.”'' This statement is regarded as highly controversial by ecologists and other sustainability scientists.

"Dirty Industries" controversy

In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo that was leaked to the press. Lant Pritchett has claimed authorship of the private memo, which both he and Summers say was intended as sarcasm. The memo stated that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted."

Service in the Clinton Administration

In 1993 Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs and later in the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.

Much of Summers's tenure at the Treasury Department was focused on international economic issues. He was deeply involved in the Clinton administration's effort to bail out Mexico and Russia when those nations had currency crises. Summers set up a project through which the Harvard Institute for International Development provided advice to the Russian government between 1992 and 1997. Later there was a scandal when it emerged that some of the Harvard project members had invested in Russia, and were therefore not impartial advisors. Summers encouraged then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to use the same "three-'ations'" of policy he advocated in the Clinton Administration-- "privatization, stabilization, and liberalization."

Summers pressured the Korean government to raise its interest rates and balance its budget in the midst of a recession, policies criticized by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. According to the book The Chastening, by Paul Blustein, during this crisis, Summers, along with Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for regime change in Indonesia.

Summers was a leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against American leadership in greenhouse gas reductions and against US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, according to internal documents made public in 2009.

As Treasury Secretary, Summers led the Clinton Administration's opposition to tax cuts proposed by the Republican Congress in 1999. Also during his stint in the Clinton Administration, Summers was successful in pushing for capital gains tax cuts. During the California energy crisis of 2000, then-Treasury Secretary Summers teamed with Alan Greenspan and Enron executive Kenneth Lay to lecture California Governor Gray Davis on the causes of the crisis, explaining that the problem was excessive government regulation. Under the advice of Kenneth Lay, Summers urged Davis to relax California's environmental standards in order to reassure the markets.

Summers hailed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which lifted more than six decades of restrictions against banks offering commercial banking, insurance, and investment services (by repealing key provisions in the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act): "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers said. "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." Many critics, including President Barack Obama, have suggested the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis was caused by the partial repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act. Indeed, as a member of President Clinton's Working Group on Financial Markets, Summers, along with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt, Fed Chairman Greenspan, and Secretary Rubin, torpedoed an effort to regulate the derivatives that many blame for bringing the financial market down in Fall 2008.

Summers's role in the deregulation of derivatives contracts

On May 7, 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and practitioners to determine "how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards without impairing the ability of the OTC (Over-the-counter) derivatives market to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global financial marketplace." On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Summers testified before congress that "the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies." Summers, like Greenspan and Rubin who also opposed the concept release, offered no proof that the contracts would not be misused by financial institutions. Instead, Summers stated that "to date there has been no clear evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must bear the burden of demonstrating that need." In 1999 Summers endorsed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying "With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century."

The lack of regulation that allowed A.I.G. to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities was a direct result of efforts by the Treasury (first under Rubin and then under Summers), the Federal Reserve (under Greenspan), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (under Arthur Levitt) to deregulate the derivatives markets. The first response to the CFTC Concept Release was issued as a joint statement from Rubin, Greenspan, and Levitt who stated that they "have grave concerns about this action and its possible consequences." Levitt and Greenspan have admitted that their views on this issue were mistaken. Levitt told WGBH in Boston that "I could have done much better. I could have made a difference." Greenspan told a congressional hearing that "I found a flaw ... in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." When George Stephanopoulos asked Summers about the financial crisis in an ABC interview on March 15, 2009, Summers replied that "there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what's happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous."

At the 2005 Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Raghuram Rajan presented a paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" Rajan pointed to a number of potential problems with the financial developments of the past thirty years. The problems that Rajan considers include skewed incentives of managers, herding behavior among traders, investment bankers, and hedge fund operators who suffer withdrawals if they under-perform the market. Rajan also discusses (on pp. 337–40) the problems associated with firms that "goose up returns" by taking risky positions that yield a "positive carry." This is how the infamous Joseph J. Cassano impressed his superiors at A.I.G. for a decade while sowing the destruction of the firm. During the boom years of the housing market, the credit default swap contracts that A.I.G. Financial Products sold provided a stream of premium payments to the company with no expense stream. That's an example of what Rajan calls "goosing up returns" with latent risk. Rajan asks (on page 388) "If firms today implicitly are selling various kinds of default insurance to goose up returns, what happens if catastrophe strikes?" This is a fair question.

The flip side of the trade is equally problematic. Gregory Zuckerman in his book The Greatest Trade Ever about John Paulson's hedge fund recounts the difficulties that Paulson and others had holding on to their bets against the housing market. Even Paulson, whose timing couldn't have been better, spent a great deal of his time persuading investors to persist with the bet against the market. But month after month, millions of dollars were paid out on the credit default swap premia. The investors saw money spent and gone that could have been used to buy assets with rising prices, or at least held safely with a positive yield. As Rajan puts it (p. 338), "it takes a very brave investment manager with infinitely patient investors to fight the trend, even if the trend is a deviation from fundamental value."

Justin Lahart, writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 2009 about the response to Rajan's paper at the conference recounts that "former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, famous among economists for his blistering attacks, told the audience he found 'the basic, slightly lead-eyed premise of [Mr. Rajan's] paper to be largely misguided.'"

In a recent paper (on pages 285–87), Steven Gjerstad and Nobel laureate Vernon L. Smith describe more fully (1) the contribution of derivatives to the flow of mortgage funds that supported the housing bubble, (2) the concerns that Brooksley Born had raised about the dangers inherent in these contracts, (3) Summers's contribution to their deregulation, and (4) how these contracts precipitated the collapse of the financial system in 2007 and 2008.

On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC's “This Week” program, Clinton said Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives.

President of Harvard

In 2001, when George W. Bush became President, Summers left the Treasury Department and returned to Harvard as its 27th President, serving from July 2001 until June 2006. He is considered Harvard's first Jewish president, though his predecessor Neil Rudenstine had Jewish ancestry, and received praise from Harvard's Jewish community for his support. However, a number of Summers's decisions at Harvard attracted public controversy.

Cornel West affair

In an October 2001 meeting, Summers criticized African American Studies department head Cornel West for allegedly missing three weeks of classes to work on the Bill Bradley presidential campaign, and complained that West was contributing to grade inflation. Summers also claimed that West's "rap" album (in fact a spoken word album) was an "embarrassment" to the university. West pushed back strongly against the accusations. "The hip-hop scared him. It's a stereotypical reaction," he said later. West, who later called Summers both "uninformed" and "an unprincipled power player" in describing this encounter in his book ''Democracy Matters'' (2004), subsequently returned to Princeton University, where he taught prior to Harvard University.

Differences between the sexes

In January 2005, at a Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers sparked controversy with his discussion of why women may have been underrepresented "in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions".

Summers had prefaced his talk, saying he was adopting an "entirely positive, rather than normative approach" and that his remarks were intended to be an "attempt at provocation."

Summers then began by identifying three hypotheses for the higher proportion of men in high-end science and engineering positions:

# The high-powered job hypothesis # Different availability of aptitude at the high end # Different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search

The second hypothesis, different availability of aptitude at the high end, caused the most controversy. In his discussion of this hypothesis, Summers said that "even small differences in the standard deviation [between genders] will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [from the mean]". Summers referenced research that implied differences between the standard deviations of males and females in the top 5% of twelfth graders under various tests. He then went on to argue that, if this research were to be accepted, then "whatever the set of attributes... that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley... are probably different in their standard deviations as well".

Summers then concluded his discussion of the three hypotheses by saying:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

Summers then went on to discuss approaches to remedying the shortage of women in high-end science and engineering positions.

This lunch-time talk drew accusations of sexism and careless scholarship, and an intense negative response followed, both nationally and at Harvard. Summers apologized repeatedly. Nevertheless, the controversy is speculated to have contributed to his resigning his position as president of Harvard University the following year, as well as costing Summers the job of Treasury Secretary in Obama's administration.

Summers's opposition and support at Harvard

On March 15, 2005, members of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which instructs graduate students in GSAS and undergraduates in Harvard College, passed 218–185 a motion of "lack of confidence" in the leadership of Summers, with 18 abstentions. A second motion that offered a milder censure of the president passed 253 to 137, also with 18 abstentions.

The members of the Harvard Corporation, the University's highest governing body, are in charge of the selection of the president and issued statements strongly supporting Summers.

FAS faculty were not unanimous in their comments on Summers. Influential psychologist Steven Pinker defended the legitimacy of Summers's January lecture. When asked if Summers's talk was "within the pale of legitimate academic discourse," Pinker responded "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa. There is certainly enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously."

Summers had stronger support among Harvard College students than among the college faculty. One poll by the Harvard Crimson indicated that students opposed his resignation by a three-to-one margin, with 57% of responding students opposing his resignation and 19% supporting it.

In July 2005, the only African-American board member of Harvard Corporation, Conrad K. Harper, resigned saying he was angered both by the university president's comments about women and by Summers being given a salary increase. The resignation letter to the president said, "I could not and cannot support a raise in your salary, ... I believe that Harvard's best interests require your resignation."

Support of economist Andrei Shleifer

Harvard and Andrei Shleifer, a close friend and protege of Summers, controversially paid $28.5 million to settle a lawsuit by the U.S. government over the conflict of interest Shleifer had while advising Russia's privatisation program. The US government had sued Shleifer under the False Claims Act, as he bought Russian stocks while designing the country's privatisation. In 2004, a federal judge ruled that while Harvard had violated the contract, Shleifer and his associate alone were liable for treble damages.

In June 2005, Harvard and Shleifer announced that they had reached a tentative settlement with the US government. In August, Harvard, Shleifer and the Department of Justice reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million dollars worth of damages.

Because Harvard paid almost all of the damages and allowed Shleifer to retain his faculty position, the settlement provoked allegations of favoritism on Summers. His continued support for Shleifer strengthened Summers's unpopularity with other professors:

"I've been a member of this Faculty for over 45 years, and I am no longer easily shocked," is how Frederick H. Abernathy, the McKay professor of mechanical engineering, began his biting comments about the Shleifer case at Tuesday's fiery Faculty meeting. But, Abernathy continued, "I was deeply shocked and disappointed by the actions of this University" in the Shleifer affair.

In an 18,000-word article in ''Institutional Investor'' (January 2006), the magazine detailed Shleifer's alleged efforts to use his inside knowledge of and sway over the Russian economy in order to make lucrative personal investments, all while leading a Harvard group, advising the Russian government, that was under contract with the U.S. The article suggests that Summers shielded his fellow economist from disciplinary action by the University. Summers's friendship with Shleifer was well known by the Corporation when it selected him to succeed Rudenstine and Summers recused himself from all proceedings with Shleifer, whose case was actually handled by an independent committee led by Derek Bok.

Losses on financial derivatives

During Summers's presidency at Harvard, the University entered into a series totalling US$3.52 billion of interest rate swaps, financial derivatives that can be used for either hedging or speculation. Summers approved the decision to enter into the swap contracts as president of the university and as a member of Harvard Corp., "the university's seven-member ruling body" which bears "the school's ultimate fiduciary responsibility." By late 2008, those positions had lost approximately $1 billion in value, a setback which forced Harvard to borrow significant sums in distressed market conditions to meet margin calls on the swaps. In the end Harvard paid $497.6 million in termination fees to investment banks and has agreed to pay another $425 million over 30–40 years. The decision to enter into the swap positions has been attributed to Summers and has been termed a "massive interest-rate gamble" that ended badly.

Resignation as Harvard President

On February 21, 2006, Summers announced his intention to step down at the end of the school year effective June 30, 2006. Harvard agreed to provide Summers on his resignation with a one-year paid sabbatical leave, subsidized a $1 million outstanding loan to the university for his personal residence, and provided other payments. Former University President Derek Bok acted as Interim President while the University conducted a search for a replacement which ended with the naming of Drew Gilpin Faust on February 11, 2007. After a one year sabbatical, Summers subsequently accepted the University's invitation to serve as the Charles W. Eliot University Professor, one of twenty select University-wide professorships, with offices in the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School. He also joined the D. E. Shaw Group in October 2006 as a part-time managing director. Summers also has been authoring a column for the ''Financial Times''.

Post-Harvard presidency career

On October 19, 2006, he became a part-time managing director of the investment and technology development firm D. E. Shaw & Co. He drew a large salary from this job.

Upon the death of libertarian economist Milton Friedman, Summers wrote an Op-Ed in ''The New York Times'' entitled "The Great Liberator" arguing that "any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites." In it Summers wrote that even though Friedman's contributions to monetary policy have been highly lauded, his most important contribution may have been "in convincing people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate."

Henry Kissinger once said that Larry Summers should "be given a White House post in which he was charged with shooting down or fixing bad ideas."

In 2006 he was a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons which reviewed the work of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

In February 2009, he quoted John Maynard Keynes, saying "When circumstances change, I change my opinion", reflecting both on the failures of Wall Street deregulation and his new leadership role in the government bailout.

National Economic Council

As director of the White House National Economic Council, he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration, where he attracted both praise and criticism. There had been friction between Summers and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, as Volcker accused Summers of delaying the effort to organize a panel of outside economic advisers, and Summers had cut Volcker out of White House meetings and had not shown interest in collaborating on policy solutions to the economic crisis. On the other hand, Obama himself was reportedly thrilled with the work Summers did in his first few weeks on the job. And Peter Orszag, another top economic advisor, called Summers "one of the world's most brilliant economists."

In January 2009, as the Obama Administration tried to pass an economic stimulus spending bill, Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR.) criticized Summers, saying that he thought that President Barack Obama is "ill-advised by Larry Summers. Larry Summers hates infrastructure." DeFazio, along with liberal economists including Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, had argued that more of the stimulus should be spent on infrastructure, while Summers had supported tax cuts. Summers had come under fire for accepting perks from Citigroup, including free rides on its corporate jet in 2008. According to the ''Wall Street Journal'', Summers called Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) asking him to remove caps on executive pay at firms that have received stimulus money, including Citigroup.

On April 3, 2009 Summers came under renewed criticism after it was disclosed that he was paid millions of dollars the previous year by companies which he now has influence over as a public servant. He earned $5 million from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw, and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money.

In early April 2010, Joshua Green reported that Summers was frustrated with his position at the NEC and upset that he was not chosen to replace Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve. It was considered likely that Summers would soon leave the post.

On September 21, 2010, the White House announced that Summers would step down from his position on the NEC at the end of the year, to return to Harvard University. In a speech to the Economic Policy Institute upon leaving his post, Summers "warn[ed] against the creeping cost of government" and "approvingly quot[ed] Daniel Patrick Moynihan's argument that increased government involvement in the health care sector is a risky idea."

Post-NEC career

In addition to teaching at Harvard after leaving the Obama administration, in June 2011 Summers joined the board of directors of Square, a company developing an electronic payment service, and became a special adviser at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

In popular culture

The 2010 film ''The Social Network'', which deals with the founding of the social networking site Facebook, shows Summers (played by Douglas Urbanski), in his then-capacity as President of Harvard, meeting with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to discuss their accusations against Mark Zuckerberg. Summers is depicted as dismissive of the twins' concerns and as unable to appreciate the potential value of Facebook. In a July 2011 interview Summers seemed to confirm the movie's accuracy in its depiction of his handling of the Winklevoss twins.

Larry Summers had a number of references when Barack Obama appeared on ''The Daily Show''.

In the 2010 documentary ''Inside Job'', Summers is presented as one of the key figures behind the Late-2000s financial crisis. Charles Ferguson points out the economist's role in what he characterizes as the deregulation of many domains of the financial sector.

Notes

References

External links

Faculty page at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

Profile at the U.S. Treasury Department

Lawrence Summers at Big Think

''Voices on Antisemitism'' Interview with Lawrence Summers from the US Holocaust Museum, , February 15, 2007

Robert Scheer on Resignation of Lawrence Summers – video report by ''Democracy Now!'', September 22, 2010

|- {{U.S. Secretary box | before= Robert Rubin | after= Paul O'Neill | years= 1999–2001 | president= Bill Clinton | department= Secretary of the Treasury}} |- |-

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Name	Charlie Rose
Birthname	Charles Peete Rose, Jr.
Birth date	January 05, 1942
Birth place	Henderson, North Carolina, U.S.
education	Duke University B.A. (1964) Duke University J.D. (1968)
occupation	Talk show hostJournalist
years active	1972–present
credits	''Charlie Rose'', ''60 Minutes II'', ''60 Minutes'', ''CBS News Nightwatch'', ''CBS This Morning''
url	http://www.charlierose.com/ }}

Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942) is an American television talk show host and journalist. Since 1991 he has hosted ''Charlie Rose'', an interview show distributed nationally by PBS since 1993. He has also co-anchored ''CBS This Morning'' since January 2012. Charlie, along with Lara Logan, has revamped the CBS classic Person to Person, a news program during which celebrities are interviewed in their homes, originally hosted by the legendary Edward R. Murrow.

Early life

Rose was born in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child of Margaret Frazier and Charles Peete Rose, Sr., tobacco farmers who owned a country store. As a child, Rose lived above his parents' store in Henderson and helped out with the family business from age seven.. Rose admitted in a Fresh Dialogues interview that as a child his insatiable curiosity was constantly getting him in trouble. A high school basketball star, Rose entered Duke University intending to pursue a degree with a pre-med track, but an internship in the office of Democratic North Carolina Senator B. Everett Jordan got him interested in politics. Rose graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in history. At Duke, he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. He earned a Juris Doctor from the Duke University School of Law in 1968. He met his wife, Mary (''née'' King), while attending Duke.

Career

After his wife was hired by the BBC (in New York), Rose handled some assignments for the BBC on a freelance basis. In 1972, while continuing to work at Bankers Trust, he landed a job as a weekend reporter for WPIX-TV. His break came in 1974, after Bill Moyers hired Rose as managing editor for the PBS series ''Bill Moyers' International Report''. In 1975, Moyers named Rose executive producer of ''Bill Moyers Journal''. Rose soon began appearing on camera. "A Conversation with Jimmy Carter," one installment of Moyers's series ''U.S.A.: People and Politics'', won a 1976 Peabody Award. Rose worked at several networks honing his interview skills until KXAS-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth hired him as program manager and gave him the late-night time slot that would become the ''Charlie Rose'' show.

Rose worked for CBS News (1984–1990) as the anchor of ''CBS News Nightwatch'', the network's first late-night news broadcast. The ''Nightwatch'' broadcast of Rose's interview with Charles Manson won an Emmy Award in 1987. In 1990, Rose left CBS to serve as anchor of ''Personalities'', a syndicated program produced by Fox Broadcasting Company, but he got out of his contract after six weeks because of the tabloid-style content of the show. ''Charlie Rose'' premiered on PBS station Thirteen/WNET on September 30, 1991, and has been nationally syndicated since January 1993. In 1994, Rose moved the show to a studio owned by Bloomberg Television, which allowed for improved satellite interviewing.

Rose was a correspondent for ''60 Minutes II'' from its inception in January 1999 until its cancellation in September 2005, and was later named a correspondent on ''60 Minutes''.

Rose was a member of the board of directors of Citadel Broadcasting Corporation from 2003 to 2009. In May 2010, Charlie Rose delivered the commencement address at North Carolina State University.

On November 15, 2011, it was announced that Rose would return to CBS to help anchor ''CBS This Morning'', replacing ''The Early Show'', commencing January 9, 2012, along with co-anchors Erica Hill and Gayle King.

Cameo appearances

Rose has appeared as himself in the 1998 film ''Primary Colors'', in a 2000 episode of ''The Simpsons'' and in the 2008 movie ''Elegy''. He and his show were also used in the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums. He also appears as himself in the 2011 George Clooney directed film, ''The Ides of March''.

Accusations of conflict of interest

While hosting the 2002 Coca-Cola Company shareholders' meeting, Rose said "few companies are able to connect as completely with consumers in the way that Coca-Cola is. It is a privilege to be associated with [The Coca-Cola family] ... This is the business of Coca-Cola: being part of a family, being worldwide, doing well and doing good at the same time." Afterward, Coca-Cola agreed to become what Rose called "a leading underwriter" of ''The Charlie Rose Show'', paying "six or possibly seven figures." Even the Charlie Rose mugs used on his PBS show feature a Coca-Cola logo on one side. Although CBS News policy bars correspondents from doing commercials and product endorsements, the ''Washington Post'' reported CBS was "comfortable" with Rose's actions. Rose insists he "would never do a story on ''60 Minutes II'' about anybody who underwrites my PBS show."

Quiet influence

''The New York Times'' reported that Rose encouraged a discussion between the leaders of NBC and Fox, that led eventually to a mutual reduction in ad hominem attacks between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly on their respective news programs.

Rose has attended several Bilderberg Group conference meetings, including meetings held in the United States in 2008; Spain in 2010; and Switzerland in 2011. These unofficial conferences hold guests from North America and Western Europe, most of whom are political leaders and businessmen. Details of meetings are closed off to the public and strictly invitation-only, and critics speculate the controversial nature of these meetings of highly influential people. Accusations from conspiracy theorists against The Charlie Rose show claim that it has become the US media outlet for Bilderberg.

Personal life

Rose's twelve-year marriage to Mary Rose (née King) ended in divorce in 1980. Mary is the sister-in-law of Morgan Stanley Chairman John J. Mack. Since 1993, his companion has been socialite and city-planning advocate Amanda Burden, a stepdaughter of CBS founder William S. Paley.

On March 29, 2006, after experiencing shortness of breath in Syria, Rose was flown to Paris and underwent surgery for mitral valve repair in the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital. His surgery was performed under the supervision of Alain F. Carpentier, a pioneer of the procedure. Rose returned to the air on June 12, 2006, with Bill Moyers and Yvette Vega (the show's executive producer), to discuss his surgery and recuperation.

In a 2009 Fresh Dialogues interview Rose described his life as "great and glorious." He added, '"I get up every morning with a new adventure. The adventure is fueled by interesting people. I get a chance to control my own destiny. I do something that is immediately either appreciated or not. I get feedback."

Rose owns a farm in Oxford, North Carolina, an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City, a beach house in Bellport, New York, an apartment in Washington D.C..and an apartment in Paris, France.

References

External links

Charlie Rose Official website of his eponymous show

Charlie Rose official channel on ''YouTube''

Charlie Rose collected news and commentary at the ''Los Angeles Times''

Charlie Rose shows on Hulu

celebritynetworth.com, Celebrity Net Worth, Charlie Rose

Why Business Loves Charlie Rose David A. Kaplan, ''Fortune'', September 28, 2009

Category:American journalists Category:American television talk show hosts Category:New York television reporters Category:CBS News Category:60 Minutes correspondents Category:Duke University alumni Category:New York University alumni Category:People from Henderson, North Carolina Category:1942 births Category:Living people

bg:Чарли Роуз de:Charlie Rose fa:چارلی رز fr:Charlie Rose he:צ'ארלי רוז ro:Charlie Rose ru:Роуз, Чарли sv:Charlie Rose

Robert Scheer (born 1936) is an American journalist who writes a column for ''Truthdig'' which is nationally syndicated in publications such as the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' and ''The Nation''. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and is Editor in Chief for the online magazine ''Truthdig''.

Beginnings through Vietnam

Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a native of Germany, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, ''Cuba, an American tragedy'' (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of ''Ramparts'' magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in ''Ramparts'' and by Bantam Books.

During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War.

In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military.

In the November 1970 California election, Scheer ran for the U.S. Senate as the nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party against Republican Senator George Murphy and Democratic Congressman John V. Tunney. Scheer received 56,731 votes and lost the election to Mr. Tunney.

After Vietnam

After several years freelancing for magazines, including ''New Times'' and ''Playboy,'' Scheer joined the ''Los Angeles Times'' in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.

After Scheer left the ''Times'' in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the ''Nation'' magazine.

Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at and syndicated by public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica.

Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton. He conducted the noted 1976 ''Playboy'' interview with Jimmy Carter, in which the then-presidential candidate admitted to having "lusted" in his heart. In an interview with George H.W. Bush, the future president and then presidential candidate revealed that he believed nuclear war was "winnable." Scheer has profiled politicians from Californians Jerry Brown and Willie Brown to Washington insiders like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as entertainment figures like actor Tom Cruise.

Books

Scheer's latest book, "The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street" (Nation Books), was released on September 7, 2010. Publishers Weekly wrote that the book "proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows.” The Los Angeles Times published a review of the book by Jonathan Kirsch on October 17, 2010.

Scheer has written eight other books, including a collection entitled ''Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power,'' ''With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War,'' and ''America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals.'' In 2004, Scheer published ''The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq'' and made it to the ''Los Angeles Times'' Bestseller List. It was co-authored by his oldest son, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at ''Alternet.''

In 2006 Scheer published ''Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush''; in 2008 he published ''The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.''

Scheer has taught courses at Antioch College, City College of New York, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley. He is now a senior lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where he teaches two courses each semester on media and society.

Scheer was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos award recipient. He won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his writing in the ''Los Angeles Times'' and ''The Nation'' about the case of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University.

Scheer and his son were creative script consultants on the Oliver Stone film, ''Nixon,'' which was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. He has appeared in small speaking roles as a journalist in several feature films, including ''The Siege'' and ''Bulworth''. In 2005, the Mill Valley Film Festival premiered a documentary on the activist and philanthropist Stanley Sheinbaum which Scheer co-produced.

Political views

Iraq War

In an August 6, 2002, article, he wrote that "a consensus of experts" informed the Senate that the Iraqi weapons arsenal was “almost totally destroyed during eight years of inspections.” On June 3, 2003, Scheer concluded that White House justifications for the war were a "big lie." On November 4, 2003, he penned an article in favor of withdrawal from Iraq.

World War II

In an April 7, 2010, article he wrote that Harry Truman perpetrated "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history when he annihilated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Scheer repeated these allegations on the radio program "Left, Right and Center".

Support of Republican Candidate for Kentucky Senate

In the October 1, 2010, episode of the radio show "Left, Right and Center", Scheer, a self-described Liberal, expressed support for Rand Paul, son of former Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, in his bid for the 2011-2016 Kentucky Senate seat.

End of ''Los Angeles Times'' relationship

Scheer has often expressed highly controversial thoughts. For example, on February 15, 2005, Scheer wrote an article entitled "What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us" for the LA Times. In it, he asked, "Would George W. Bush have been reelected president if the public understood how much responsibility his administration bears for allowing the 9/11 attacks to succeed?" After running his column for more than 12 years and working as a reporter for the paper 17 years prior, the ''Los Angeles Times'' ended a nearly thirty year relationship with Scheer in November 2005, citing the need to cut costs while subsequently replacing him with two right-wing columnists. Scheer said in an interview with "Democracy Now!" that the paper's owner, the Tribune Company, currently owns a newspaper and a television station in the same market, which is illegal, and may have fired Scheer in an attempt to make it easier to obtain a waiver permitting the dual ownership from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He also commented during a November 14, 2005, appearance on ''Democracy Now!'' that,

"What happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh…. I was a punching bag for those guys. I'm still standing, and the people who run the paper collapsed."

In a posting at the Huffington Post, Scheer wrote:

:"The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately 60 percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher."

Scheer's firing incited a protest held outside the ''Times'' downtown office on November 15, and hundreds of readers wrote letters of complaint while some, including actress Barbra Streisand, publicly announced the cancellation of their ''Times'' subscriptions. Within a few days of his column being retired by the ''Times'', the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' offered itself as the new home paper of Scheer's syndicated column, which now runs on Wednesdays there and elsewhere. On November 29, 2005, he co-launched, as editor in chief, a new online magazine called ''Truthdig.'' In 2007, ''Truthdig'' was a finalist for three Webby Awards, in the news, blog (political), and politics categories; the site won both the People's Voice and professional jury prizes in the Political Blog category. In 2010, ''Truthdig'' again received the Webby Award jury prize for best political blog.

Awards

Robert Scheer was awarded the 2010 Distinguished Work in New Media Award and in 2011 Ithaca College announced Scheer the winner of the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.

References

External links

Truthdig, a progressive online magazine aka www.robertscheer.com

Robert Scheer Features at Creators Syndicate

''Left, Right & Center''

Robert Scheer at AlterNet

''Citizen Stan'' documentary

Robert Scheer: "Where Is the Community Organizer We Elected?" – video report by ''Democracy Now!''

Democracy Now!: Amy Goodman interviews Robert Scheer about "The Great American Stickup"

The Real News: Paul Jay asks Robert Scheer "Why Are House Republicans Reading the Constitution? - January 6, 2011 (video 10:25)

Radio interview with Claudia Cragg KGNU on 'The Great American Stickup'

Category:1936 births Category:American columnists Category:American tax resisters Category:American Jews Category:American people of German descent Category:American people of Russian descent Category:Living people Category:Jewish American writers Category:City College of New York alumni Category:Syracuse University alumni Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:Yale University fellows Category:Stanford fellows Category:University of Southern California faculty Category:KCRW Category:Date of birth missing (living people)

de:Robert Scheer nl:Robert Scheer