Derek Leebaert

Derek Leebaert is a partner at effectivRAI and an author of books on history and politics. He won the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award for Grand Improvisation.

Leebaert published Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made which was a Wall Street Journal "Best Book of 2023" and "recommended reading" from McKinsey. Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith praises it as "having done the near impossible--craft[ing] a fresh and challenging portrait of the man and his inner circle. . . .A book to regard in the same breath as the classics of Sherwood, Schlesinger, and Burns." The Guardian reviewed it as "masterful."

Writings To Dare and to Conquer was a Washington Post Book World "Nonfiction Best Book" of 2006. His previous book, Grand Improvisation (2018) was a New York Times "Best Book," and reviews are found in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Times (London), et al. Leebaert also co-authored the MIT Press trilogy on the IT revolution, including The Future of the Electronic Marketplace and The Future of Software. .

Life

In 1977 Leebaert was a research fellow at Harvard University and managing editor of International Security journal. He taught in the government and business school departments at Georgetown University.

Books Author The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World Boston : Little, Brown, 2002. , To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda New York : Little, Brown, 2006. , Magic and Mayhem: the Delusions of American foreign policy from Korea to Afghanistan, New York : Simon & Schuster, 2010. , Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018. , Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made, St. Martin's Press, 2023.

Editor European Security : prospects for the 1980s, Lexington, Mass. : Lexington Books, 1981. , Soviet Military Thinking, London; Boston : Allen & Unwin, 1981. The Future of the Electronic Marketplace, MIT Press, 1998. The Future of Software, MIT Press, 1995 Technology 2001: The Future of Computing and Communications, MIT Press, 1991

Selected articles Postwar Delusions: Why America Keeps Making Mistakes Abroad by Derek Leebaert