Board of Trustees Events

Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post.

Max Boot’s new biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend, is his third New York Times bestseller. It was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2024 by the New York Times, and also made best-of-the-year lists from The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Economist. It has been acclaimed as the "definitive biography" (The New Yorker), a “magisterial,” “vivid,” and “splendid” account (The Washington Post), “enormously readable and scrupulously honest” (The Sunday Times), and a book that "stands out for its deep research, lucid prose and command of its subject’s broad political and social context" (The New York Times). Boot’s previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Boot is also the author of four other widely acclaimed books: The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018); the New York Times bestseller Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013); War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006); and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history and has been placed on military professional reading lists.

Boot has been a CNN global affairs analyst and a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and many other radio and television programs. He was named in 2018 one of America’s “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation and one of the 50 most influential Jewish Americans by the Forward newspaper. Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio.

Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002, Boot was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal and, before that, an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. He has also been a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Commentary, and many other publications.

Boot holds a bachelor’s degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California at Berkeley (1991) and a master’s degree in history from Yale University (1992). He was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives with his family in New York City.

Thomas A. Cole is chair emeritus of Sidley’s Executive Committee. He was a partner from 1981 through 2016 and senior counsel from 2017 through 2022. He retired from the practice of law on December 31, 2022. During his time as a partner at Sidley, Tom was also vice president-law of Northwest Industries, Inc. from 1982 through 1985.

For 15 years ended in April 2013, Tom served as chair of the firm’s Executive Committee, the committee that exercises general authority over the affairs of the firm. In April 2014, he stepped down as a member of the Executive Committee (on which he had served since 1987) and as a member of the firm’s Management Committee (on which he had served since 1988).

Tom focused his practice on public company mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance. He was consistently recognized by Chambers USA and Chambers Global. In 2001, Tom was recognized by Chambers Global as one of the 26 U.S. lawyers included in its list of the “Global 100 Lawyers”—“lawyers who stand out from their colleagues and are recognized internationally.” He was designated an M&A “Dealmaker of the Year” for 2007 by The American Lawyer. He was selected for BTI Consulting’s “Client Service All-Star” team in 2008, 2011 and 2014. In 2010 and 2013, Tom was named to “The Directorship 100,” the NACD’s list of “the most influential people in the boardroom community.” In 2015, he was named a “M&A and Antitrust Trailblazer” by The National Law Journal.

Corporate governance assignments included advising public company boards and their standing and special committees on a variety of subjects, including internal investigations, CEO succession, shareholder activism and proxy contests. Activism defense assignments included TreeHouse Foods (against Jana Partners), United Continental Holdings (against PAR and Altimeter), PulteGroup (against the founder and Elliott Management), Commercial Metals (against Icahn), Navigant Consulting (against Engine Capital) and International Game Technology (against Ader Investment Management). He represented Elaine Wynn in her withhold vote campaign against a Wynn Resorts incumbent director.

For the five years ended 1998 and from 2013 through 2021, Tom taught the seminar on corporate governance at The University of Chicago Law School. He taught the same seminar at Harvard Law School in 2015. His book, “CEO Leadership: Navigating The New Era in Corporate Governance” was released by The University of Chicago Press in November 2019. His book, “Collaborative Crisis Management”, written with co-author Paul Verbinnen, was released by The University of Chicago Press in September 2022.

Daniel Aaronson is senior vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Prior to his current position, he led the Bank’s applied microeconomics group.

Aaronson’s research has primarily been in labor economics and economic history. It has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and Journal of Labor Economics, and has also been featured in Chicago Fed publications, including Economic Perspectives and Chicago Fed Letter.

Aaronson joined the Chicago Fed in 1996 after obtaining his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. He received his B.A. from Washington University in St Louis. He has taught microeconomics as an adjunct professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management since 2009.

Bonny Lin is director of the China Power Project and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Previously, she was the acting associate director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE and a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where she analyzed different aspects of China’s foreign and defense policy and U.S. competition with China, including China’s use of gray zone tactics against U.S. allies and partners.

Her research advised senior leaders in the Department of Defense, including military leaders at U.S. Pacific Air Forces and U.S. Army Pacific. Dr. Lin also served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2015 to 2018, where she was director for Taiwan, country director for China, and senior adviser for China.

Dr. Lin has testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct at the RAND Corporation and Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA).

Dr. Lin holds a PhD in political science from Yale University, a master’s degree in Asian studies with a focus on China from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard College.