Leslie Howard "Les" Gelb (March 4, 1937 – August 31, 2019)[1] was an American academic, correspondent and columnist for The New York Times who served as a senior Defense and State Department official and later the President Emeritus[2] of the Council on Foreign Relations.
[2] He was director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense from 1967 to 1969, winning the Pentagon's highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal.
Robert McNamara appointed Gelb as director of the project that produced the controversial Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War; Gelb led the team of 36 analysts, including Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Warnke, Morton Halperin, Richard Holbrooke, John Galvin, Paul F. Gorman, Richard Moorstein, Hans Heymann and Melvin Gurtov, in drafting the 47-volume, 7,000-page study of the war's history, presenting it to McNamara and his successor Clark Clifford in early 1969, only for them to not read it.
The period included his leading role on the Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1986 for a six-part comprehensive series on the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative.
In addition to his work at Council on Foreign Relations, Gelb was also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He served as the chairman of the advisory board for the National Security Network, which identifies itself as a "progressive" think tank,[12] and served on the boards of directors of several non-profit organizations including Carnegie Endowment, the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, the James Baker Institute at Rice University, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy.