Dr. Ernest W. Lefever established the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976 and was its president until 1989. For two years, 1981-83, Dr. Lefever served as a part-time consultant to the Secretary of State on counter-terrorism. He did contract research on peacekeeping for the Defense Department and terrorism for the State Department.
He earned an A.B. from Elizabethtown College and a B.D. and a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Yale University. Dr. Lefever was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.
Dr. Lefever wrote, co-authored, or edited twenty books, including, Ethics and U.S. Foreign Policy (1957), Profile of American Politics (co-author, 1960), Arms and Arms Control (1962), Crisis in the Congo (1965), Spear and Scepter: Army, Police, and Politics in Tropical Africa (1970), Ethics and World Politics (co-author, 1972), TV and National Defense (1974), Nuclear Arms in the Third World (1979), Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World (1979), The CIA and the American Ethic (co-author, 1980), The Apocalyptic Premise: Nuclear Arms Debated (co-editor, 1982), and Perestroika: Mikhail Gorbachev and His Critics (co-editor). One or more have appeared in eight foreign languages.
His two last titles were The Irony of Virtue: Ethics and American Power (1998) and America's Imperial Burden: Is the Past Prologue? (1999).
His writing has appeared the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, USA Today, TV Guide, Foreign Affairs, National Review, American Spectator, The National Interest, and many other journals.
From 1964 to 1976, Dr. Lefever was a senior foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Institution. He did research at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, taught political science at the University of Maryland, American University, and Georgetown University, and headed the Foreign Affairs division of the Library of Congress. He lectured at the National War College, the Army, Navy, and Air Force War Colleges, the Japan Defense College, Moscow University, the Foreign Service Institute, and many American universities.
In support of his research and writing, Dr. Lefever traveled in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. He visited the Baltic states, the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, the People's Republic of China, and Cuba. He participated in international conferences in Austria, Britain, Canada, Chile, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Swaziland, Switzerland, and Taiwan.
During the first three years after World War II he was a field secretary for the World's Alliance of YMCAs in Europe, working among German prisoners of war in Britain and West Germany. He was a foreign affairs staff specialist with the National Council of Churches in New York, 1952-54.
