About Jeffrey H. Boutwell

Jeffrey H. Boutwell grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, just 15 miles from where George S. Boutwell was born in 1818 on the family farm in Brookline. He graduated from Yale in 1974 with a B.A. in history, writing his senior thesis on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. He began his career as a reporter and editor with the famed City News Bureau of Chicago and was a book reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times. After two years in the Windy City, Boutwell moved to Berlin and then to England, where he received an M.Sc. in Economics and Politics from the London School of Economics in 1978.

In 1978, he returned to the U.S. and worked for two years in Washington, D.C., for the Carter Administration, preparing briefing books on foreign and defense policy issues. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984.

Boutwell had a 30-year career as a foreign policy analyst with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (1995 Nobel Peace Prize) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has traveled to more than 50 countries. His work included nuclear weapons arms control, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, environmental degradation and civil conflict, and other international security issues. His work for the American Academy and Pugwash included editing and publishing the Academy Occasional Paper Series on international affairs and the Pugwash Newsletter.

In 2007, he served a short stint as speechwriter for New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson in his bid for the Democratic nomination for President.

Boutwell is the author/editor of The German Nuclear Dilemma (Cornell University Press, 1990), Israeli-Palestinian Security (American Academy 1995), and Weapons in Space (W.W. Norton, 1988). His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in Daedalus, Scientific American, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Times, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and elsewhere.

In “retirement” Boutwell has organized several U.S.-Cuba projects on marine science and education, has written about some and seen all of the 38 Shakespeare plays produced on stage, and taken numerous road trips in his Mini Cooper JCW throughout the United States. He lives in Columbia, Maryland, with his wife, Buthaina Shukri (pictured above), and enjoys having children and grandchildren close by and also scattered around the country, including daughter Sarah and grandson Siyah (pictured here at Arlington National Cemetery during Wreaths Across America).