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Gary Hart
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Since retiring from the United States Senate, Gary Hart has been extensively involved in international law and business, as a strategic advisor to major U.S. corporations, and as a teacher, author and lecturer.

He is currently President of Hart International, Ltd. He is chair of the Threat Reduction Advisory Council at the Department of Defense, was vice-chair of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council, former chair of the Council for a Livable World, chair of the American Security Project, and co-chair of the US-Russia Commission. For the past five years, he was a Scholar in Residence at the University of Colorado Denver.

Gary Hart was co chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century. The Commission performed the most comprehensive review of national security since 1947, predicted the terrorist attacks on America, and proposed a sweeping overhaul of U.S. national security structures and policies for the post-Cold War new century and the age of terrorism. For 15 years, Senator Hart was Senior Counsel to Coudert Brothers, a multinational law firm with offices in thirty-two cities located in nineteen countries around the world.

He was president of Global Green, the U.S. affiliate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s environmental foundation, Green Cross International. He is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund; a member of the Defense Policy Board; and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was co-chair of the Council task force that produced the report: “America Unprepared—America Still at Risk”, in October, 2002. Senator Hart is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences task force on Science and Security.

Gary Hart has been Visiting Fellow, Chatham Lecturer, and McCallum Memorial Lecturer at Oxford University, Global Fund Lecturer at Yale University, and Regents Lecturer at the University of California. He has earned a doctor of philosophy degree (D.Phil.) from Oxford University and graduate law (J.D.) and divinity (B.D.) degrees from Yale University. He was visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School and is the author of nineteen books.

Gary Hart represented the State of Colorado in the United States Senate from 1975 to 1987. In 1984 and 1988, he was a candidate for his party’s nomination for president.

Senator Hart was first elected to the Senate in 1974, having never before sought public office, and was re elected in 1980. During his 12 years in the Senate, he served on the Armed Services Committee, where he specialized in nuclear arms control and was an original founder of the military reform caucus. He also served on the Senate Environment Committee, Budget Committee, and Intelligence Oversight Committee. During his Senate years, he played a leadership role in major environmental and conservation legislation, military reform initiatives, new initiatives to advance the information revolution and new directions in foreign policy. He is widely-recognized as among the first to forecast the end of the Cold War.

Gary Hart has traveled extensively to the former Soviet Union, Europe, the Far East and Latin America. Senator Hart resides with his family in Kittredge, Colorado.

Blog Entries by Gary Hart

Weep for the Senate

(407) Comments | Posted May 5, 2013 | 4:12 PM

Generations of United States Senators now past would view with dazed wonder at what the world's greatest deliberative body has become. Virtually all struggled to serve their and many struggled even more to stay there. Throughout the nation's history the prestige of such service was second only to the presidency...

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Orthodoxy and Change

(60) Comments | Posted March 16, 2013 | 1:36 PM

Underlying all the media focus on the Catholic cardinals' selection of a new pope, and the predictable focus on personality over meaning, was a much greater struggle between tradition and reform, conservatism and progress. That struggle mirrors politics in America and most western democracies.

We humans are divided between preservation...

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A Plague of Drones

(409) Comments | Posted March 9, 2013 | 9:59 AM

The nature of warfare has, more often than not throughout history, been driven by technology. The Trojan horse, you might say, was a technological invention of the Greeks, followed by the long bow, catapults, machine guns, nuclear weapons, and... the drone.

The drone is new and effective and, for the...

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Learning From America's History of Assassinations

(385) Comments | Posted February 6, 2013 | 8:41 AM

It is unfortunate that senior administration officials making life and death decisions today on when, where, and against whom drone strikes should be launched did not live through, as I did, the period of 1975-76 when Congressional investigations, including the famous Church committee, discovered plots by our government to assassinate...

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Democrats and Defense

(299) Comments | Posted January 26, 2013 | 8:37 AM

There is a distinct pattern for Democratic presidents to select Republicans as Secretaries of Defense. These include: Bill Cohen, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta (a Democrat who began as a Republican), and now Chuck Hagel. All of these were good Secretaries. Bill Cohen is a friend of many years, and I...

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America's Greatness

(570) Comments | Posted January 20, 2013 | 5:54 PM

America has done some extraordinary things. Leave aside victory in war, though the triumph of the Union was a triumph for union and World War II rid the world of fascism, at least for a time. There was the Louisiana Purchase, the Westward expansion and the occupation of the continent,...

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'This Is About Human Beings'

(576) Comments | Posted January 4, 2013 | 1:55 PM

"This is not about politics," said one conservative Republican Congressman, "this is about human beings." Later, a colleague added: "This is not a handout." Both are from New York and both were arguing, and rightly so, for federal aid to areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

But both have participated in...

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America's Children and the Constitutional Army That Protects Them

(1122) Comments | Posted December 22, 2012 | 10:52 AM

Gun ownership was a fact of life in early America. That fact was never challenged, and little discussed, during the founding era. The Constitution's drafters, however, felt it necessary to recognize that fact as central to the maintenance of a "well-regulated militia." The militia, mentioned twice elsewhere than in the...

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Real Minutemen, Rise Up!

(2573) Comments | Posted December 16, 2012 | 1:03 PM

It may take the slaughter of small children to finally prompt true minutemen to separate themselves from gun extremists. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that gun ownership is guaranteed by the Constitution and an estimated 300 million guns of various kinds are at large in the nation. It is...

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The Club

(130) Comments | Posted December 2, 2012 | 1:42 PM

If the "unlimited debate" (filibuster) rule continues to be abused in the Senate, little will be accomplished in the second Obama term. Regardless, proposed reform of this rule is not as simple as it looks from the outside. This has to do with the unique nature of the Senate.
...

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Does the Spirit of Lincoln Still Live?

(283) Comments | Posted November 18, 2012 | 9:40 AM

We search through the lives of a few Americans to solve the mystery of who we are and how we, as a nation, should live. This is more true of Abraham Lincoln than perhaps any other American who ever lived. The new movie Lincoln haunts your mind for hours and...

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The Fairness Election

(385) Comments | Posted November 10, 2012 | 11:01 AM

Law students learn very quickly that the law is about what is and is not legal (and mostly about all those cases that don't fall clearly into either neat category), but that there is another parallel system for governing society that is called equity. In some jurisdictions there are even...

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Remembering George McGovern

(209) Comments | Posted October 21, 2012 | 9:31 AM

Forty years after, it is still surprising that so many historians, journalists, and concerned Americans want to talk about the 1972 presidential election. George McGovern lost. Even more to the point, America lost. He routinely accepted his share of responsibility for this. But a large percentage of America's voters spoke...

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Winners and Losers

(186) Comments | Posted October 18, 2012 | 12:26 PM

The political media has long treated politics as a sport and a contact sport at that. All the verbs and most of the adjectives are taken from the sports pages. And, of course, it is all about winning and losing. From this perspective, George McGovern goes down as an epic...

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We Have Been Warned

(856) Comments | Posted October 14, 2012 | 12:39 PM

Why didn't anyone tell us? is the question everyone will be asking. Well, not everyone. A few of us, particularly Richard Clarke and more recently Leon Panetta, have been warning the nation. But too few have been listening. The threat, of course, is cyber warfare, the destructive use of computers...

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Myth and Its Dangers

(495) Comments | Posted October 7, 2012 | 3:24 PM

Myths play a central role as metaphor in many world religions, according to Joseph Campbell. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth he studied the world mythologies, found common themes in a wide variety of cultures, and reached a startling conclusion: myths, he said, come...

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Draw a Line. Don't Cross It.

(124) Comments | Posted September 30, 2012 | 4:56 PM

Principles are central to human behavior. "Unprincipled" is one of the harshest accusations one person can make about another. Principles are also central to government and politics. Parties and public official we hope will conduct themselves according to principles that guide their beliefs and actions. Principles are the basis for...

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How Democrats Can Get Back on Offense

(4) Comments | Posted September 4, 2012 | 8:47 AM

With GOP policy, language and funding in the grip of far-right regressives -- and its national ticket too -- now is the time for Congressional Democrats to sharpen differences to win and govern. Here's our Open Letter to 10 Congressional Leaders signed by 20 leading Democrats.

Robert Frost once...

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Welcome to the American Republic, Mr. Eastwood

(677) Comments | Posted August 31, 2012 | 4:09 PM

Tempting as it is to send the iconic movie-maker Clint Eastwood a copy of Plato or even one of my books on the Republic, it would probably not make his day. But the past week, with its attempt to focus on economic issues, despite candidates telling their life stories or...

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A Landslide Election

(870) Comments | Posted August 18, 2012 | 11:53 AM

The media-friendly catch-phrase "It's the economy, stupid" appeals to those who like their politics, and their government, simple. By and large people do vote their pocketbooks. But those same people have sons and daughters in the military, work for companies with international operations, and are threatened, at least to some...

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