Daniel Benjamin bio

1. Name: Daniel Benjamin
2. Title:

Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding
3. Biography: Daniel Benjamin is the former Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State with the rank of Ambassador-at-Large, sworn in on May 28, 2009. Prior to his appointment, Ambassador Benjamin was Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution from 2006-2009.

He spent six years as a Senior Fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 1994 to 1999, Benjamin served on the National Security Council staff. In 1998, he was Director for Counterterrorism in the Office of Transnational Threats leaving the office in 1999. He served as Foreign Policy speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Clinton from 1994 to 1997.

Before entering government, Benjamin was a foreign correspondent for Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Together with Steven Simon, Benjamin wrote The Age of Sacred Terror, which documents the rise of al Qaeda and religiously motivated terrorism, as well as America’s efforts to combat that threat, which was named a The New York Times Notable Book of 2002 and was given the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations. Benjamin and Simon would follow up The Age of Sacred Terror in 2005 with The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right.

He also edited America and the World in the Age of Terror: A New Landscape of International Relations for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in 2005. He has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate.com, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
4. Involvement/ Affiliations:
  • Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding
  • Director for the Center on the United States and Europe, and Senior Fellow of Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution, 2006-2009
  • Director for Counterterrorism in the Office of Transnational Threats, 1998-1999
  • Foreign Policy Speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Clinton
  • National Security Council in the Clinton Administration, 1994-1997
  • Journalist and Foreign Correspondent for Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal
  • Columnist for Slate.com
5. Education:
  • B.A., New College Oxford, England, 1985
  • B.A., Marshall Scholar, Harvard University, 1983
  • M.A, Harvard University, 1983
6. Published Works:
  • The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right (Co-written with Steven Simon), 2005
  • The Age of Sacred Terror (Co-written with Steven Simon), 2002
7. Contact info:

The Dickey Center for International Understanding
6048 Haldeman Center
Dartmouth College,
Hanover, NH 03755