He has been a university teacher and a staff member at high levels of the U.S. government.
[2] Garfinkle was a speechwriter for both of President George W. Bush's Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
Francis Fukuyama, Eliot Cohen, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Josef Joffe, and Ruth Wedgwood were among the magazine's founding leadership.
[3] Early in his career, Garfinkle worked at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (1972–1978 and from 1981).
He served on the staff of the National Security Study Group of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission), as an aide to General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. (1979–1980), and an assistant to Senator Henry M. Jackson (1979).