An Exclusive Luncheon & Conversation with Max Boot

Speaker: Max Boot 

Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. 

Boot’s new biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend (September 2024, Norton/Liveright), has been acclaimed as the "definitive biography" (The New Yorker), a “magisterial,” “vivid,” and “splendid” account (The Washington Post), and a book that "stands out for its deep research, lucid prose and command of its subject’s broad political and social context" (The New York Times). Boot’s previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography. 

Boot is also the author of four other widely acclaimed books: The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018); the New York Times bestseller Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013); War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006); and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history and has been placed on military professional reading lists. 

Boot has been a CNN global affairs analyst and a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and many other radio and television programs. He was named in 2018 one of America’s “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation and one of the 50 most influential Jewish Americans by the Forward newspaper. Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. 

Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002, Boot was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal and, before that, an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. He has also been a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Commentary, and many other publications. 

Boot holds a bachelor’s degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California at Berkeley (1991) and a master’s degree in history from Yale University (1992). He was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives with his family in New York City. 

Moderator: Dr. Richard Downie 

Richard Downie is President & CEO of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall. He is also on the faculties of the Thayer Leader Development Group at West Point and Missouri State University’s Defense and Strategic Studies Program. Additionally, he chairs the Pacific Council on International Policy’s Mexico Initiative Advisory Board, and serves on the Boards of the World Hwa Rang Do Association and Westport Construction Inc., He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A graduate of the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point (Class of 1976), he holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Southern California.  

Previously, Dr. Downie served for nine years as the Director (SES-3 level) of the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington, D.C., the Department of Defense’s regional security center for the Americas. At the Perry Center, he led a wide variety of courses, seminars and conferences on security and defense topics, as well as dialogues and workshops for ministries of defense and cabinet-level national leaders. During a distinguished military career, he held a wide variety of command and staff positions, serving as an Infantryman and as a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Latin America. Dr. Downie had several assignments in Germany; was an exchange officer in Colombia, where he completed the LANCERO (International Ranger) School as the distinguished graduate; worked at both the U.S. Army South and the United States Southern Command in Panama; coordinated Western Hemisphere affairs on the U.S. Joint Staff; served with the Multinational Specialized Unit in Bosnia; and was the Defense and Army Attaché in Mexico. His final U.S. Army assignment was in command of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), where he served as the Institute’s first Commander. Dr. Downie authored Learning from Conflict: The U.S. Military in Vietnam, El Salvador and the Drug War, Greenwood Press, as well as numerous scholarly articles and other publications. His military education includes the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Course and the Defense Strategy Course. He was also a Fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Seminar XXI Program.  

His numerous US and foreign awards and decorations include: the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Defense Meritorious and the Meritorious Service Medals, the Joint Service and Army Commendation and Achievement Medals, the Army Expeditionary Medal, the Inter-American Defense Board Medal, the Order of Military Merit (Colombia), the Bosnia/ Former Yugoslavia NATO Medal, the Order of Military Merit (Mexico), the Order of the Peruvian Cross (Peru), the Order of Merit for Democracy, Grand Knight level (Colombia), the Superior War College Medal (Colombia), the First Medal of Laws (University of Nuevo Leon, Mexico), and the Order of St. Maurice (Cdr-level).