Ernest Warren Lefever papers

Ernest Warren Lefever was born on November 12, 1919, in York, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Elizabethtown College, where he graduated with an A.B. in 1942. In 1945, he received a B.D. from Yale University, where he continued to study, receiving a Ph.D. in 1956. Lefever has worked in international affairs for nearly his entire life, beginning in the years following World War II, when he was a field secretary in Europe for the World's Alliance of YMCAs. Over the course of the next two decades, Lefever worked in international affairs at the National Council of Churches (1952-1954), Johns Hopkins University (1955-1956, 1960-1961), the University of Maryland (1956-1957), the Library of Congress (1957-1959), and for Senator Hubert Humphrey (1959-1960). Between 1964 and 1976, he was a member of the senior staff of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institute. In 1976, he helped found and became president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He remained president until 1989, when he became a senior fellow. He has been an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Lefever has written, co-authored, or edited twenty books and has frequently written articles for many of America's leading newspapers and magazines.