Morton H. Halperin (born June 13, 1938) is an American analyst who deals with U.S. foreign policy, arms control, civil liberties, and the workings of bureaucracies.
He has served in a number of roles with think tanks, including the Center for American Progress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Twentieth Century Fund.
[1] He graduated from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and received his BA in political science from Columbia University in 1958.
At 29-years-old, from 1967 to 1969, he became the youngest ever[4] Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Policy, Planning, and Arms Control).
Halperin's appointment was immediately criticized by General Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; and Senator Barry Goldwater.
[9] Halperin also ended up on Nixon's Enemies List of 20 people with whom the White House was unhappy because they disagreed in some way with the administration.
When Ellsberg was investigated in connection with the Pentagon Papers, suspicion fell on Halperin, who some Nixon aides believed had kept classified documents when he left government service.
[13] After leaving the Nixon administration, Halperin joined the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow from 1969 to 1973 and then became the research director for the Project on Information, National Security and Constitutional Procedures at the Twentieth Century Fund from 1974 to 1975.
From 1977 to 1992, he served as the director of the Center for National Security Studies (jointly sponsored by the Fund for Peace and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.
[14] He defended the right of The Progressive magazine to publish a description of the design principle of a thermonuclear weapon (H-Bomb).
[15] Clinton then named him to be a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council (1994–1996).
[16] Following his service in the Clinton Administration, Halperin joined the Council on Foreign Relations (2001-2002) as senior fellow and director, Center for Democracy and Free Markets.
He was a partial writer of The Lawless State, which documents the surveillance techniques and crimes of the U.S. government during the Cold War.