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Press Room – Events – Curing the Oil Addiction – Bios

Thomas L. Friedman

Foreign Affairs columnist, New York Times
Author of the May/June 2006 Foreign Policy cover story,
The First Law of Petropolitics

Thomas L. Friedman, a world-renowned author and journalist, joined The New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in OPEC- and oil-related news and later served as the chief diplomatic, chief White House, and international economics correspondents. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles reporting the Middle East conflict, the end of the cold war, U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. His foreign affairs column, which appears twice a week in the Times, is syndicated to seven hundred other newspapers worldwide.

Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (FSG, 1989), which won both the National Book Award and the Overseas Press Club Award in 1989 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly twelve months. From Beirut to Jerusalem has been published in more than twenty-seven languages, including Chinese and Japanese, and is now used as a basic textbook on the Middle East in many high schools and universities. Friedman also wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree (FSG, 1999), one of the best selling business books in 1999, and the winner of the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy. It is now available in twenty languages. His last book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, issued by FSG in 2002, consists of columns Friedman published about September 11 as well as a diary of his private experiences and reflections during his reporting on the post-September world as he traveled from Afghanistan to Israel to Europe to Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. In 2005, The World Is Flat was given the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Friedman was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News World Report.

Friedman graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University with a degree in Mediterranean studies and received a master’s degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and has been awarded honorary degrees from several U.S. universities. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Ann, and their two daughters.

Hon. Richard G. Lugar

United States Senate
Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee

Dick Lugar is an unwavering advocate of U.S. leadership in the world, strong national security, free-trade and economic growth.
This fifth generation Hoosier is the longest serving U.S. Senator in Indiana history. He is the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a member and former chairman of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976 and won a fifth term in 2000, his third consecutive victory by a two-thirds majority.
Lugar graduated first in his class at both Shortridge High School in Indianapolis and at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He attended Pembroke College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, studying politics, philosophy and economics.
Lugar manages his family’s 604-acre Marion County corn, soybean and tree farm. Before entering public life, he helped manage with his brother Tom, the family’s food machinery manufacturing business in Indianapolis.
As the two-term mayor of Indianapolis (1968-75), he envisioned the unification of the city and surrounding Marion County into one government. Unigov, as Lugar’s plan was called, set the city on a path of uninterrupted economic growth. As Mayor, Lugar served three terms on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, including two terms as the Vice-Chair of the Commission, and served as President of the National League of Cities.

Moiss Nam

Editor in Chief, Foreign Policy Magazine
Author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Doubleday, 2005)

As Editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, Moiss Nam heads one of the world’s leading publications on international politics and economics and winner of the 2003 National Magazine Award for general excellence. He has written extensively on international political economy, economic development, world politics, and globalization’s unintended consequences. His regular opinion columns appear in the Financial Times, El Pais, Newsweek, Corriere della Serra, and many other internationally-recognized newspapers and magazines. He is the author or editor of eight books including Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, which is currently being published in 14 languages.

Dr. Nam is one of six members of Time magazine’s board of international economists and is the Chairman of the Group of Fifty, an organization of the CEO’s of Latin America’s largest corporations. Dr. Nam previously served as an executive director at the World Bank and directed policy studies on economic reforms at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry in the early 1990’s. Prior to his ministerial position, he was professor and dean at IESA, a business school and research center in Caracas.

Nam holds MSc and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.