Tod Lindberg
Research Fellow

Expertise: Political theory, international relations, American politics

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Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review, Hoover's Washington, D.C.–based bimonthly journal of essays, social criticism, and reviews on politics, government, and foreign and domestic policy. The journal's website is www.policyreview.org, where the current edition and an archive of back issues are available.

Lindberg's areas of research interest are political theory, international relations, national security policy, and American politics. He is author of The Political Teachings of Jesus (HarperCollins, 2007), a close reading of Jesus's Gospel statements about worldly affairs. He is editor of Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004). He is coeditor (with Derek Chollet and David Shorr) of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide (Routledge, 2007). He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard.

Lindberg is also general editor (with Peter Berkowitz) of the Hoover Institution series Hoover Studies in Politics, Economics, and Society, published in association with Rowman & Littlefield. Recent titles in the series include Confirmation Wars, by Benjamin Wittes, Fight Club Politics, by Juliet Eilperin, and Countering Terrorism, by Richard Posner.

Lindberg currently serves as head of the expert group on international institutions of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, a joint project of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. The task force, cochaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, will issue a report in December 2008 offering recommendations to enhance the ability of the U.S. government to respond to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities. In 2005, Lindberg served as coordinator for the task group on Preventing and Responding to Genocide and Major Human Rights Abuses for the United States Institute of Peace’s Task Force on the United Nations (the Gingrich-Mitchell task force). He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Princeton Project on National Security, for which he served as cochair of the working group on anti-Americanism.

Under Lindberg’s editorial direction, Policy Review has been cited for its "vogue and influence" by the New Yorker and has been called "important" by the New York Times and "prestigious" by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Articles from Policy Review have appeared abroad in translation in such journals and periodicals as Merkur and Le Monde.

From May 1991 to December 1998, Lindberg was editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times, for which he also wrote a weekly column about politics from 1996 to 2007. During his tenure, the Times’s editorial page was named in a New York magazine survey as one of the "top eight opinion factories" in the United States. In 1995, Washingtonian magazine named Lindberg, along with ten others, as "the A-list of the new Republican Brain Trust—the people the pols will rely on in the intra-party debates." Lindberg won an Associated Press Best Editorial Award for 1997.

Before taking over the Times’s editorial page, Lindberg was deputy managing editor of Insight magazine, an affiliate publication of the Washington Times. He was the founding executive editor of the National Interest and managing editor of the Public Interest. In 1978 he was elected to a three-year term on a high school board of education in suburban Chicago.

For several years before his appointment as a research fellow, Lindberg was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served on the jury for the 2006 and 2007 Lionel Gelber Prize.

Lindberg’s writing has also appeared in Commentary, National Review, Brookings Review, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Roll Call, and the Los Angeles Times. His writing on political theory and international relations has appeared in several scholarly volumes and publications, including Telos. An archive of his writing is available at www.todlindberg.net. He has been a guest on numerous public affairs programs, and is frequently heard as an analyst on National Public Radio.

Lindberg was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1960 and is a 1982 honors graduate in political science of the College of the University of Chicago, where he studied political philosophy with Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, among others. He lives in the District of Columbia with his wife, Tina Lindberg, who is a graphic designer, and two daughters.