Remembering Leslie H. Gelb

Heather Hurlburt was quoted in a Foreign Affairs tribute to the late former NYT editor and Council on Foreign Relations president.

In the days since Gelb’s death, I have exchanged memories with some of these mentees. “I have a wonderful memory of sitting in a darkened room, as his eyesight failed, while he read me the riot act for not standing up for myself more, not owning my own authority,” said Heather Hurlburt, who runs a politics and policy project at New America and was executive director of the center-left National Security Network, whose board Gelb chaired. “He made me feel like I'd landed in a foreign policy remake of The Karate Kid.”

In the mid-2000s, Rosa Brooks, the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, took a surprising cold call from Gelb, who asked her to help organize a conference series. This work helped lead her to a job in the Obama administration as counselor to the under secretary of defense for policy. “Les just popped up in my life out of nowhere as a sort of guardian angel,” Brooks told me.

As for me, I was Gelb’s last editorial assistant at the Times before he moved to the Council, in 1993. I wasn’t supposed to get that job. How I did says a lot about Gelb. I cut out some of his foreign affairs columns and marked them up with a pencil, showing how I would have line-edited to make them read better. I was a 21-year-old English major.