Paul Wolfowitz

Biography

Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brooklyn in 1943 and grew up in Ithaca, where his father taught statistics at Cornell. He graduated from Cornell in mathematics in 1965, joined the 1963 March on Washington, and earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago in 1972 under Albert Wohlstetter, teaching at Yale while he finished it.

He worked for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and, in 1976, joined the Team B exercise that challenged CIA estimates of Soviet power. Under Carter he was a deputy assistant secretary of defense, then left the Democrats for the Republicans. Under Reagan he was director of policy planning at the State Department, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and ambassador to Indonesia, and under George H. W. Bush he was under secretary of defense for policy.

From 1994 to 2001 he was dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. As deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005 he became one of the chief advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and is often described as one of its architects.

In 2005 he became president of the World Bank, but resigned in 2007 after a controversy over his role in a pay and promotion package for Shaha Riza, a Bank employee with whom he had a relationship.