Warren Bass is director of speechwriting and senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Before joining the Biden administration in 2021, Dr. Bass was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, working on Review, the paper’s weekend ideas section. From 2004-09, he was a senior editor at The Washington Post, first as the paper’s nonfiction book-review editor and then as deputy editor of Outlook, the paper’s former Sunday commentary and analysis section.

He served in the State Department during the first term of the Obama administration as director of speechwriting and senior policy adviser to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. In 2003-04, he served on the professional staff of the 9/11 Commission, where he was the lead investigator into National Security Council issues and one of the many writers and editors of the commission’s landmark final report, which became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for a National Book Award.

He is the author of “Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance” (Oxford University Press). The New York Times Book Review called the book “riveting.”

He has also worked as executive editor at Penguin Press, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, the director of the post-9/11 counterterrorism program at the Council on Foreign Relations, and an associate editor at Foreign Affairs.

Besides The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, he has written for publications including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, Slate, and The Los Angeles Times. 

He holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. He received his B.A. (Hon.) from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He lives with his wife and daughters in the Maryland suburbs.