2024 Benefit Gala’s Keynote Conversation Moderator
Lyndsay Howard
Foreign Policy Advisor to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Founding Delegate of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum
Lyndsay Howard is foreign policy advisor to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a founding delegate of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. She was a senior advisor to Dr. Henry A. Kissinger at Kissinger Associates, Inc. in New York.
A member of Harvard Kennedy School’s Applied History Project, she was previously a Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and Executive Director of the America and the Future of World Order Project under its Honorary Chairman, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. Ms. Howard was general editor for the publication of Dr. Kissinger’s 1950 Harvard senior honors thesis, The Meaning of History: Reflections of Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Howard served as a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community for over a decade, and was assigned to American Embassies in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, as well as Paris, Geneva and Vienna. She was a member of the Intelligence Community Working Group that traced Islamic terrorist activities in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. She also worked on Secretary James A. Baker’s staff; for the Legal Advisor for National Security Affairs at the White House; and on the U.S. Delegation of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) negotiation at the OSCE. While in government, she received numerous Superior Honor and Achievement awards.
Ms. Howard participated in Project Sapphire, the historic U.S.-Kazakhstan joint effort to remove nuclear materials from Kazakhstan after the end of the Soviet Union; was one of two Western representatives who attended the decommissioning of the Semipalatinsk Soviet nuclear weapons “Polygon” complex; and was a member of the first U.S. government team allowed to visit formerly secret Soviet nuclear cities in Tajikistan and Central Asia. She later led a research team on the UN/World Bank/USAID multibillion-dollar environmental cleanup of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Ms. Howard graduated cum laude from Vassar College’s Science, Technology, and Society program. She studied international relations, history and defense policy at Sciences Po and the Sorbonne in Paris and at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. She speaks fluent French and has studied Turkish, Italian, and Russian.
