Lee H. Hamilton became Director of the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars in January 1999. Previously, Mr. Hamilton served
for thirty-four years as a United States Congressman from Indiana.
During his tenure, he served as Chairman and Ranking Member of the
House Committee on Foreign Affairs (now the Committee on International
Relations) and chaired the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East
from the early 1970s until 1993. He was Chairman of the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence and the Select Committee to
Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran.
Also a leading figure on economic policy and congressional
organization, he served as Chair of the Joint Economic Committee as
well as the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, and was a
member of the House Standards of Official Conduct Committee. In his
home state of Indiana, Mr. Hamilton worked hard to improve education,
job training, and infrastructure. Currently, Mr. Hamilton serves as
Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University, which seeks
to educate citizens on the importance of Congress and on how Congress
operates within our government.
Mr. Hamilton remains an important and active voice on matters of
international relations and American national security. He served as a
Commissioner on the United States Commission on National Security in
the 21st Century (better known as the Hart-Rudman Commission), was
Co-Chair with former Senator Howard Baker of the Baker-Hamilton
Commission to Investigate Certain Security Issues at Los Alamos, and
was Vice-Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon
the United States (the 9/11 Commission), which issued its report in
July 2004. He is currently a member of the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board and the President's Homeland Security
Advisory Council, as well as the Director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's Advisory Board.
Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, Mr. Hamilton relocated with his family
to Tennessee and then to Evansville, Indiana. Mr. Hamilton is a
graduate of DePauw University and the Indiana University School of
Law, and studied for a year at Goethe University in Germany. Before
his election to Congress, he practiced law in Chicago and in Columbus,
Indiana. A former high school and college basketball star, he has been
inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
Mr. Hamilton's distinguished service in government has been honored
through numerous awards in public service and human rights as well as
honorary degrees. He is the author of A Creative Tension--The Foreign
Policy Roles of the President and Congress (2002) and How Congress
Works and Why You Should Care (2004), and the coauthor of Without
Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (2006).
Lee and his wife, the former Nancy Ann Nelson, have three children--
Tracy Lynn Souza, Deborah Hamilton Kremer, and Douglas Nelson
Hamilton--and five grandchildren: Christina, Maria, McLouis and
Patricia Souza and Lina Ying Kremer.