Ambassador Daniel Benjamin

Alumni Award

Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, Bi-Cultural Class of 1975, is currently Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, with the rank of Ambassador-at-Large.  

Previously, he was a top foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 1994-1999, he served on the National Security Council, and from 1998-1999 was its director of counterterrorism in the Office of Transnational Threats. 

Earlier, he was a foreign policy speechwriter and special assistant to President Clinton. 

Ambassador Benjamin is also co-author of two award-winning books: “The Age of Sacred Terror” (Random House, 2002), and “The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right” (Holt/Times Books, 2005).

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Ambassador Benjamin and his wife Henrike reside in the Washington, D.C., area, where their children attend Jewish day school.