Twenty-Seventh Term Member Conference

BODURTHA: Well, good evening. I’m Nancy Bodurtha. I’m the vice president for meetings and membership here at the Council on Foreign Relations. And on behalf of our board of directors and our president, Richard Haass, I am delighted to be welcoming you to the twenty-seventh conference of the Stephen M. Kellen Term Program. And I am particularly delighted to be welcoming you in person this evening here to our Washington, D.C. offices. I’d also like to extend a very warm welcome to those who are joining us this evening virtually, via the magic of Zoom. I think as many of you know, this is our first Term Member Conference to be held fully in person since November of 2019. And it’s really thrilling to see an extraordinarily packed house here for this event.

Before I turn the program over to our moderator and speakers this evening, I just want to say a few words about the Term Member Program, which began fifty-two years ago in 1970. The Council had a very radical idea to experiment with admitting ten young professionals to the Council for a five-year term. Fast forward to today, there’s 750 of you. But beyond that, when you...

GURA: All right everybody. I’m David Gura. I’m the business reporter for NPR. Former term member. My term ended last year. But it’s great to be here with you, and great to be here with these panelists as well. I’ll introduce them quickly. I just saw the movie Tár with Kate Blanchette. And if you haven’t seen it, it begins with this kind of deliciously torturous opening scene where Adam Gopnik spends minutes introducing her and her bio, which is quite distinguished. But you get the point. So I’ll be very brief in my introduction of who’s here. (Laughter.)

Sara Eisen is an anchor at CNBC of Closing Bell. She’s a CFR term member, along with you. Tara Hariharan is the managing director of Global Macro Research at NWI Management, joining us from New York. And Jennifer Nordquist, DJ Nordquist, is executive vice president of the Economic Innovation Group. She was at the World Bank previously, and at the Council of Economic Advisers before that.

This plenary kind of centers on inflation broadly. We’re going to get there. I think it makes the most sense just to start here in Washington and spin out. I’m reminded of what Fed Chair...

RUBENSTEIN: Welcome, everybody. I’m David Rubenstein. I’m the chair of the Council on Foreign Relations. And thank you all for coming. And I assume everybody here is a term member. Is that right? Right? OK. OK. How many of you were surprised when you got elected as a term member? Anybody? (Laughter.) OK.

Well, I should just tell you, when I worked in the White House under President Carter, before all of you were born—(laughter)—when we lost the election to Ronald Reagan, someone in the White House National Security Council staff said to me: You should become a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I said, OK, what do you? And you fill out the form. And then a couple weeks later I was told I got turned down. So, you know, can rise up to be the chairman even if you got turned down as a term member. (Laughter.) But all of you—all of you are members. And congratulations and thank you. And I hope you had a good last night and today at the Term Member conference.

The conference term members are named after Stephen Kellen, because Stephen Kellen was an active member of the Council....