Lee Feinstein's Biography

May 2010

Ambassador Lee A. Feinstein

Ambassador Lee Feinstein

Lee Feinstein was nominated by President Obama to be U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Poland on July 20, 2009 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 22, 2009 by unanimous consent.  He was sworn in on September 28, 2009.  On October 20, 2009, Ambassador Feinstein presented his credentials to the President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński.  Lee A. Feinstein is the 25th U.S. Ambassador to Poland.  As Ambassador, he also serves as Honorary Co-Chairman of the Fulbright Commission in Poland and Honorary Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Poland.

Ambassador Feinstein has worked in several senior capacities in the U.S. Departments of Defense and State, including as Principal Deputy Director of Policy Planning, where he advised on strategic goals and objectives in political-military affairs. He served as an adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in establishing the Community of Democracies in Warsaw in 2000.  Ambassador Feinstein was National Security Director to Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during her presidential campaign and a foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama during the general election.  He served on the Presidential Transition Team after the election and then as Senior Advisor to the Office of the Secretary of State.

As a Visiting Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Ambassador Feinstein wrote widely on U.S. national security and foreign policy.  He was also a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.  He advised former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader and Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, who co-chaired the congressionally mandated Task Force on the United Nations.  The report of the Task Force, American Interests and UN Reform, can be accessed here (PDF 2.55 Mb).

Ambassador Feinstein served as senior advisor to Human Rights First and is an authority on the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect.”  He is the author of Darfur and Beyond: What is Needed to Prevent Mass Atrocities, which was featured in CFR’s Emmy Award-winning multimedia Crisis Guide-Darfur. With Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution, he is also author of Means to an End: U.S. Interest in the International Criminal Court, published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2009.

An international lawyer, Ambassador Feinstein holds a J.D. from Georgetown University, an M.A. in political science from the City University of New York, and an A.B. from Vassar College.  He is married to Elaine Margaret Monaghan, a native of Scotland and a foreign correspondent, who has covered the Kosovo conflict, Northern Ireland peace talks, and the former Soviet bloc. They have two young children.

On September 15, 2009, Ambassador Feinstein appeared before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing (107.41 Kb).