Uploaded March 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Ambassador Jack Matlock, PhD, Visiting Scholar at Duke University presented in the Hal Smith Lecture Series in association with the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding in the UCI School of Social Sciences.
Ambassador Jack Matlock is a career diplomat who served on the front lines of American diplomacy during the Cold War and was U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union when the Cold War ended. Since retiring from the Foreign Service, he has focused on understanding how the Cold War ended and how those lessons might be applied to public policy today.
Since his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1991, he has held academic posts at Columbia University, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Mt. Holyoke College and the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was George F. Kennan Professor from 1996 to 2001. Since 2015 he has been a Visiting Scholar at Duke University.
He is the author of Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray--And How to Return to Reality (Yale University Press, 2010); Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (Random House, 2004, paperback edition 2005); Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Random House, 1995); Leskov into English: On Translating Соборяне (Church Folks), Columbia University, 2013, and a handbook to the thirteen-volume Russian edition of Stalin’s Collected Works (Washington, D.C. 1955, 2nd edition, New York, 1971).
Ambassador Jack Matlock, PhD, Visiting Scholar at Duke University presented in the Hal Smith Lecture Series in association with the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding in the UCI School of Social Sciences.
Ambassador Jack Matlock is a career diplomat who served on the front lines of American diplomacy during the Cold War and was U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union when the Cold War ended. Since retiring from the Foreign Service, he has focused on understanding how the Cold War ended and how those lessons might be applied to public policy today.
Since his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1991, he has held academic posts at Columbia University, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Mt. Holyoke College and the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was George F. Kennan Professor from 1996 to 2001. Since 2015 he has been a Visiting Scholar at Duke University.
He is the author of Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray--And How to Return to Reality (Yale University Press, 2010); Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (Random House, 2004, paperback edition 2005); Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Random House, 1995); Leskov into English: On Translating Соборяне (Church Folks), Columbia University, 2013, and a handbook to the thirteen-volume Russian edition of Stalin’s Collected Works (Washington, D.C. 1955, 2nd edition, New York, 1971).
