Gerald Warburg earned his BA in Political Science and Education at Hampshire College and MA in Political Science at Stanford in 1979, where he worked closely with CISAC fellows. He is now Executive Vice President of Cassidy & Associates, a prominent public affairs firm in Washington DC, and has served as a visiting professor at Georgetown University, Penn, Stanford, and Hampshire. He has also recently been appointed Professor of Practice of Public Policy at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Warburg has more than a decade of experience as a senior aide to members of both the U.S. House and Senate leadership. As Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Alan Cranston on Trade, Defense, and Foreign Policy, he coordinated the Senator’s work on the Committees on Foreign Relations, Intelligence, and the International Finance and Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the Banking Committee. Previously, Mr. Warburg served as Legislative Assistant for Energy, Environment and Trade issues to U.S. Representative Jonathan B. Bingham, Chairman of the International Economic Policy and Trade Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Mr. Warburg was also an aide to U.S. Senator John Tunney on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. He is the author of Conflict and Consensus: The Struggle Between Congress and the President Over Foreign Policymaking (Harper & Row, 1989), and a novel (about Stanford China scholars) entitled The Mandarin Club, (Bancroft Press, 2006).

Drell Lecture Recording: NA

Drell Lecture Transcript: NA

Speaker's Biography: The author of the acclaimed The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers provides a unique analysis of the moral weight of warfare through the lenses of philosophy and psychology.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the 2005.

Packer's articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Dissent and other publications. He received the 2006 Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown and his magazine reporting has won three Overseas Press Club awards.

Packer will be in conversation with Tobias Wolff (English, Stanford) and Debra Satz (Philosophy, Stanford). Wolff has written several books including Our Story Begins, winner of the 2008 Story Prize, The Barracks Thief, Old School and This Boy's Life. He has also been the editor of Best American Short Stories and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work appears regularly in "The New Yorker," "The Atlantic," "Harper's," and other magazines and literary journals.

Debra Satz is the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Center on Ethics. Her research focuses on the ethical limits of markets, the place of equality in political philosophy, theories of rational choice, democratic theory, feminist philosophy, and issues of international justice. Her work has appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, Journal of Philosophy, and World Bank Economic Review.

On Friday, May 20 Rush Rehm (Drama and Classics, Stanford) will direct a performance of Packer's 2008 play Betrayed.

For more information, please visit Stanford's Ethics and War Series website.

The Gurs Zyklus, performance of Trimpin's stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.From the astonishing mind of MacArthur "Genius Award"- winning inventor and sound sculptor, Trimpin: A stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.

Combining live performance with kinetic sculpture, and world history with personal biography, The Gurs Zyklus ("Gurs Cycle") represents the fruits of a lifetime of curiosity, investigation, inspired tinkering, and riveting invention on the part of Trimpin, the brilliant artist of one name and no definable genre.

As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp.

These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, weave together in a stage performance truly like no other: Vocalists sing and speak texts drawn from the Rosenberg letters into "fire organs" of Trimpin's invention. Projections of historic images from Gurs meld with film from Trimpin's own retracing of the journey by train to the camp. The music of Nancarrow meets sounds derived from bark patterns of the trees near Gurs-among the last living "witnesses" to the camp's dark history. Throughout, Gurs Zyklus offers a novel perspective on an important story now at the edges of living memory, as well as a stage experience that is immersive and deeply moving.

POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION with Trimpin and Jenny Bilfield.

This event is sponsored by Stanford Lively Arts.

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website.

Trimpin discusses his year-long Stanford residency and his new work which combines kinetic musical sculpture with emotionally-powerful WWII history.

As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp. These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, come together in a unique multimedia stage performance, The Gurs Zyklus, that will be presented by Stanford Lively Arts on Saturday, May 14.

This event is sponsored by the Aurora Forum.

For more information, please visit Stanford's Ethics and War Series webstie.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film, directed by Errol Morris, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003) and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003).

Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts McNamara's life, from his birth during the First World War remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to his being employed as Secretary of Defense and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of defense, despite limited military experience.

According to Morris, hearing McNamara raise all of these ethical issues and questions about a war which most of us see as morally unambiguous is very, very powerful. What Morris especially liked about the film was that it proved it was possible to make a movie about events – events that are removed from us by 40, 50, 60 years but which are very much about today. Many of the issues that McNamara is talking about in the movie are relevant to what's going on right now, and there's this surreal sense that nothing has changed.

» Watch the trailer.

Faculty talk back led by Scott Sagan (Co-Director of Center for International Security and Cooperation / Political Science, Stanford)

• Should citizens be required to serve their country by fighting for it?
• Do we think differently about the decision to go to war when only a small number of citizens will fight it?
• Do volunteer armies and draft armies fight differently in combat?

This panel discussion focuses on the draft versus the volunteer army in the U.S. Our distinguished panelists examine "who should fight" in a democracy, focusing on the ethical dimension of a state's system of military service.

Panelists are:

David Kennedy (History, Emeritus, Stanford). Kennedy's scholarly focus is on the integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. A prolific historian, he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in History for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was a 1981 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History for Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which uses the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system.

Eliot Cohen (Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies). Cohen's work focuses on diplomacy, international relations, irregular warfare, military history, military power and strategy, as well as strategic and security issues. He has served as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He also directed the U.S. Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey.

Jean Bethke Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago). Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Elshtain writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations. Elshtain has authored many books including Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times' notable book for 1995); and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.