President and Director, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Lee H. Hamilton is President and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Director of The Center on Congress at Indiana University. Mr. Hamilton represented Indiana’s 9th Congressional District for thirty-four years beginning in 1965. He served as Chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and chaired the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. As a member of the House Standards of Official Conduct Committee Mr. Hamilton was a primary draftsman of several House ethics reforms. Mr. Hamilton served as Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission from 2002 until 2004 and, since 2004, co-chaired the 9/11 Public Discourse Project for monitoring implementation of the Commission’s recommendations. He is currently a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, the FBI Director’s Advisory Board, the CIA Director’s Economic Intelligence Advisory Panel, the Defense Secretary’s National Security Study Group, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Task Force on Preventing the Entry of Weapons of Mass Effect on American Soil. Mr. Hamilton is a graduate of DePauw University and Indiana University School of Law. Before his election to Congress, Mr. Hamilton practiced law in Chicago, Illinois and Columbus, Indiana. Mr. Hamilton is the author of A Creative Tension - The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2003), and How Congress Works and Why You Should Care (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).