Derek Leebaert

Derek Leebaert is a partner at effectivRAI¹ and an author of books on history and politics. He won the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award for Grand Improvisation.²

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."

To Dare and to Conquer was a Washington Post Book World "Nonfiction Best Book" of 2006,.³ His book, Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, in 2010 warns that much of US foreign policy is based on ignorance of that country's history and culture.⁴ 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. .⁵

In 1977 Leebaert was a research fellow at Harvard University and managing editor of International Security journal.⁶ He taught in the government and business school departments at Georgetown University.⁷

Author

• The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World Boston : Little, Brown, 2002. ISBN 9780316518475, OCLC 47023559⁸
• To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda New York : Little, Brown, 2006. ISBN 9780316143844, OCLC 859079737³
• Magic and Mayhem: the Delusions of American foreign policy from Korea to Afghanistan, New York : Simon & Schuster, 2010. ISBN 9781439141670, OCLC 764542809⁹¹⁰
• Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018. ISBN 9780374250720, OCLC 1019972309¹¹¹²¹³
• Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made, St. Martin's Press, 2023. ISBN 9781250274694 OCLC 1310772643

Editor

• European Security : prospects for the 1980s, Lexington, Mass. : Lexington Books, 1981. ISBN 9780669025187, OCLC 615033433
• 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

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