Kenneth Adelman is an American diplomat, Shakespeare historian and a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Adelman is known for being a self-titled 'lifelong neocon activist.' A former member of the neoconservative organization the Committee of the Present Danger, he has also worked for Project For The New American Century, a think tank proposing new policies to help keep the United States a global leader. Adelman received his BA in philosophy and religion from Grinnell College in Iowa. From Georgetown University he earned an MA in foreign service studies and a PhD in political theory.
He began working for the government in 1969 in the Commerce Department and later in the Office of Economic Opportunity. During the Ford Administration (1975-1977), he was an assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. For nearly three years, he served as deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and for nearly five, during the Reagan Administration, he was Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Adelman was an advisor to President Ronald Reagan during the superpower summits between Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. For over 17 years, he has been a national editor of Washingtonian magazine. His political writing and analysis appears in publications such as the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Adelman is the co-author (with Normand Augustine) of a book on leadership in the work of the Bard, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage (2001). He teaches Shakespeare at Georgetown University and George Washington University, and regularly invokes Shakespeare in support of his own political positions: on NPR, he once quoted Othello in support of the War in Iraq and King Henry V in lauding President George W. Bush. (Since then, he has expressed regret of his original stance, calling the national security team "incompetent...deadly, [and] dysfunctional.")

Ideas recorded at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival on: 7/2/07