Contact:

Peter W. Rodman (Courtesy: Department of Defense)

The U.S. Institute of Peace was deeply saddened to learn of the untimely death on August 2 of Peter Warren Rodman. Rodman served as the Department of Defense’s ex officio representative on the Institute’s board from March 2004 until March 2007.

“Peter was a great friend of the Institute and an important figure in US foreign policy circles for four decades. The Institute is proud to have benefited from his keen intellect during his tenure here and was pleased to have supported some of his voluminous, scholarly work. He will be sorely missed,” said USIP president Richard H. Solomon.

Rodman’s career in international affairs was broad and influential. He came to Washington in 1969 to serve as an assistant to then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who had been his undergraduate thesis advisor at Harvard. Working with Kissinger, Rodman became an instrumental member of the Nixon administration teams that reopened US relations with China and ended the Vietnam War.

Rodman continued on the National Security Council staff through the Ford administration. He went on to serve as director of policy planning at the Department of State from 1984 to 1986. He also served as deputy national security advisor under President Ronald Reagan and as special assistant for national security affairs under President George H.W. Bush.

In the 1990s, Rodman was senior editor of National Review and, later, director of national security programs at the Nixon Center.

Rodman was a prolific writer and the author of nearly 10 books on foreign affairs, including More Precious Than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World, which was the result of a USIP research grant. His last book, Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, will be published by Knopf in early 2009.

Rodman was serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs when he was named to the Institute’s board by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004. He left the defense department in 2007 to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he remained until his death.

The Institute extends its condolences to Peter's wife, Veronique, and the rest of the Rodman family.