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Advancing America’s National Security Interests: A Profi le of YAF Alumnus Marc Thiessen
Advancing America’s National Security Interests:
A Profile of YAF Alumnus Marc Thiessen
By Taylor Hathorn, Director of Alumni Relations
About Marc Thiessen
Young America’s Foundation alumnus and lecturer Marc Thiessen is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he writes about American Presidential leadership, counterterrorism, and U.S. foreign and defense policy issues. A member of the White House senior staff under President George W. Bush, Thiessen served as chief speechwriter to President Bush and to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Before As a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Marc Thiessen writes on joining the Bush administration, Thiessen spent critical national security issues and co-hosts a popular podcast, What the Hell is Going On? more than six years as spokesman and senior policy advisor to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, a longtime YAF ally. A biweekly columnist for the Washington Post, Thiessen is also a Fox News contributor, appearing regularly on “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” “America’s Newsroom,” and other programs. His book on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program, Courting Disaster, is a New York Times bestseller. Along with Governor Scott Walker, YAF’s president, Thiessen is also the co-author of Unintimidated. Thiessen is currently co-host of the top-rated podcast What the Hell Is Going On? and has interviewed several U.S. officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The program airs weekly and can be found on any podcast platform. Thiessen holds a B.A. from Vassar College and completed postgraduate studies at the Naval War College.
As a speechwriter, policy advisor, author, and podcast host, Young America’s Foundation alumnus Marc Thiessen has been around the world and back—quite literally. Having served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, it is no surprise that Thiessen is a key player in today’s conversations on U.S. foreign policy. Thiessen was in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 77 was deliberately crashed into the U.S military’s headquarters by al-Qaeda hijackers. When reflecting on the most impactful moment of his career, Thiessen recalls 9/11. “Being in the Pentagon on September 11th and being a part of our country’s response was humbling, to say the least. I saw the first war of the 21st century up close, from the planning rooms of the Pentagon to the battlefronts of the Middle East,” he says. For today’s students, 9/11 is a moment in history, but those like Thiessen, who were involved in America’s response in the subsequent days, remember that period like it was yesterday. Thiessen notes vividly, “I will never forget flying into Bagram Air Base outside Kabul just days after it had been abandoned by the Taliban. When we landed, an officer came on board the aircraft and said, ‘Don’t step off the tarmac because the entire base is a minefield. If you walk off, you will come back without a limb, if you’re lucky.’” Throughout his time in the Bush administration, he traveled 250,000 miles across 50 countries with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and served as President Bush’s chief speechwriter. Thiessen was in Afghanistan during Rumsfeld’s first visit to the country after the fall of the Taliban and accompanied
the Secretary during his first visit to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He adds, “While often intense, there were moments when I thought, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I get to do this every day. One of those moments was when I accompanied Secretary Rumsfeld to Uzbekistan and met the U.S. Special Forces team that had launched the cavalry charge on Mazar-i-Sharif.” After he left government service, Thiessen became a columnist at the Washington Post—providing a strong conservative voice—and joined the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he conducts U.S. foreign and defense policy analysis. He is passionate about bringing conservative principles into today’s policy conversations and highlighting their impact on the world at large. His new podcast—“What the Hell is Going On?”—helps him do just that. In the past year, Thiessen and co-host Danielle Pletka’s podcast has climbed the charts. The duo has hosted guests including President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Senator Tim Scott, YAF President Governor Scott Walker,
University of California, Los Angeles, students attending YAF’s 2010 West Coast Leadership Conference meet Thiessen and receive signed copies of his book, Courting Disaster.
— MARC THIESSEN Karl Rove, and many other conservative leaders. Thiessen and Pletka’s goal is to help listeners make sense of the complicated debates roiling America and the world. “We are debating important issues—on foreign policy, the economy, and so on—and our goal is to find the most interesting people who can tell us what the hell is going on,” Thiessen says. “What is the Biden administration doing right? What are they doing wrong? What should be the conservative response to these challenges?” Thiessen’s favorite episode series of the podcast—“What the Hell is Going On with Peace in the
The YAF chapter at Linfi eld Christian School in Temecula, California, hosts Thiessen for a school-wide lecture in 2016.
Governor Scott Walker, YAF’s president, and Marc Thiessen co-author Unintimidated, which tells the story of Walker’s leadership in Wisconsin in the face of leftist protestors who occupied the Wisconsin State Capital. As co-hosts of a popular podcast—What the Hell is Going On?— Thiessen and Danielle Pletka seek to hold government offi cials and policymakers accountable.
Middle East?”—featured Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer. The program highlighted the groundbreaking successes related to peace in the Middle East, which Thiessen considers the Trump administration’s greatest accomplishment. Improving relations in the Middle East has long been seen as impossible by those in Washington policymaking circles, which is precisely why Thiessen believes the Trump administration was successful. “Don Rumsfeld taught me that many things happen the way that they do in Washington because that’s how they’ve always been done,” he says. “There has been no policy more calcifi ed by that kind of thinking than Middle East policy. Donald Trump hadn’t been immersed in Middle East orthodoxy for the past 40 to 50 years. So, he asked, ‘Why? It doesn’t have to operate that way.’” Thiessen notes the outrage expressed by the foreign policy establishment towards the Trump administration’s new approach. He says critics warned that if the United States moved its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, that would set the region afl ame and set back the cause of peace. Others argued that if America imposed crippling sanctions on Iran in response to its nuclear ambitions, that would disrupt the region. These outcomes, and many others, did not come to pass. Instead, the Trump administration’s policies gave Arab nations confi dence to reach peace with Israel. However, the national landscape looks quite different today than it did just a few months ago. Conservatives are no longer in the White House and do not control Congress. Leftist ideology and radical ideas seem to be gaining ground. Thiessen, though, believes the future is bright for America. He observes, “The Left today is the party of the suburban and urban elites. Conservatives are the party of ordinary Americans who have been forgotten, and we should focus our efforts on them.” He notes, “It was Bill Buckley, the godfather of the modern Conservative Movement, who ruminated that he would ‘rather be governed by the fi rst 2,000 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the Harvard University faculty.’” On the topic of America’s youth— the focus of YAF’s mission—Thiessen argues, “A university is supposed to be a ‘safe space,’ to use the Left’s term, to explore ideas.” He asks rhetorically, “Students are encouraged to celebrate gender exploration, exploration of communism, and sexual exploration, to name a few areas, but the only exploration that’s not allowed is ideological exploration, right?”
Reflecting on his own experience as a conservative-minded student at Vassar College, Thiessen argues that the liberalism on college campuses is not a reflection solely of today’s climate. Discrimination against conservatives has long been a feature of many educational institutions. He shares, “I got involved with YAF at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where I first heard Ollie North speak. When I met him, I asked if he would take a picture while reading the Vassar Spectator, our conservative campus paper. As the editor, I then published that photo.” He adds, “I remember that picture absolutely set my campus on fire, so we ran with the idea. Every time we worked with conservative speakers, we would bring copies of our newspaper and ask them to take a picture reading the publication. It really was a riot.” Thiessen credits YAF and his time as a conservative student as the moment when it all began to click. “YAF taught me not to just take what you’re spoon-fed, but to challenge what I was being taught, be willing to take the heat for not necessarily toeing the party line, and to go outside of the curriculum and syllabus that I was given to find different ideas,” he says. His advice to today’s conservative student activists is simple: think critically. Thiessen believes that YAF’s encouragement of ideological curiosity is why the Foundation plays an important role in the fight for free speech well beyond the grounds of college campuses. Thiessen concludes, “There are many who encourage falling in line and frame this as better for the nation. Do not be afraid to challenge orthodoxy—we all have a role to play in prevailing against socialist ideas and promoting strong American principles.”
At YAF’s annual National High School Leadership Conference in 2015, Thiessen educates students about the importance of strong U.S. leadership abroad.
Thiessen interviews President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in 2020.
Spring 2021 Volume 42 • Number 1
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Young America’s Foundation mourns the passing of Dr. Walter E. Williams, a dear friend and one of the country’s most articulate and staunchest defenders of individual liberty. For more than 50 years, Williams—the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University—played an integral role in advancing YAF’s mission of inspiring young people, from speaking at the 1975 YAF Convention in Chicago to addressing college students at the Foundation’s annual National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C., to crisscrossing the country to deliver YAF-sponsored lectures to campus audiences.
