Morton Halperin

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 served in the Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, and Obama administrations.

He has taught at Harvard University and as a visitor at other universities including Columbia, George Washington University, and Yale.

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.

He was also a senior advisor to the Open Society Foundations.

Halperin was born to a Jewish family on June 13, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York.

He graduated from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and received his BA in political science from Columbia University in 1958.

Thereafter, he attended Yale University, where he received an MA in international relations in 1959 and a PhD in the discipline in 1961.

Halperin has three sons — David Halperin, Mark Halperin, former senior political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and Gary Halperin.

He is the brother of Daniel Halperin, the Stanley S. Surrey Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School.

Halperin began his career in academia as a research associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (1960–66).

He was an instructor in government at Harvard (1961-1963) and an assistant professor of government (1964-1966).

From 1966 to 1967, Halperin served as a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

At 29-years-old, from 1967 to 1969, he became the youngest ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Policy, Planning, and Arms Control).

He joined the National Security Council in 1969 as the director of policy planning.

Halperin and Henry Kissinger, Nixon's new National Security Advisor, had been colleagues at Harvard.

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.

On May 9, 1969, the New York Times reported that the United States had been bombing Cambodia.

Kissinger called Hoover to find out who might have leaked this information to the press.

Hoover suggested Halperin, and Kissinger agreed that was likely.

That day, the FBI began tapping Halperin's phones at Kissinger's direction.

The Nixon administration bugged Halperin's home phone, without a warrant, for 21 months starting in 1969.

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.

Halperin was number 8 on the list.

Nixon aide Charles Colson, who compiled the list, wrote next to Halperin's name, "a scandal would be helpful here."

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara asked Halperin to oversee the production of the Pentagon Papers.

Les Gelb, a member of Halperin's staff, oversaw the staff that actually wrote the study.

Halperin was a friend of Daniel Ellsberg.

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.

The tapping of Halperin's phone without a warrant was discovered when it came out in Ellsberg's trial.

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.

Despite the continued use of the wiretap well after Halperin left government, Kissinger told reporters on May 13, 1973, that, "I never received any information that cast any doubt on [Halperin's] loyalty and discretion."

Halperin sued in federal court.

He was the director for the Project on National Security and Civil Liberties from 1975 to 1977.

Halperin won a symbolic $1 judgment in 1977 for the offense, but the judgment was overturned by an appeals court.

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. And from 1992 to 1994, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

From 1984 to 1992, Halperin served as director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) office in Washington.

In 1991, Kissinger apologized to Halperin in a letter and the suit was dropped at Halperin's request in 1992.

In 2005, he married Diane Orentlicher, a professor of international law at the American University Washington College of Law.

Orentlicher formerly served as a deputy in the Office of War Crimes in the U.S. Department of State.