Joseph Persico: Fall Member Guest Luncheon

Joseph Persico entered the U.S. Navy in 1952, serving as Lt. j.g. aboard a minesweeper and also with NATO Headquarters in Naples, Italy. He later became a Foreign Service Officer for the United States Information Agency in Argentina, Brazil, and Washington. In 1966, Persico was tapped as the chief speechwriter for New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. He remained Rockefeller's primary speechwriter as the Governor assumed the office of Vice President from 1974 to 1977, experience that Persico would turn into his acclaimed character study, The Imperial Rockefeller.

In 1977, Persico became a full-time author, focusing on historical subjects from the Civil War to espionage and Nazi Germany, culminating in the landmark Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which was adapted for a television miniseries.

Roosevelt's Secret War caused a major stir upon publication, revealing a president who had to build his country's intelligence capabilities on the fly and in a hurry, and did so with an expert touch that belied his straightforward public image. Rife with astonishing revelations from both the freewheeling intelligence efforts of William "Wild Bill" Donovan's OSS and the socialite spy rings run from Roosevelt's living room as well as the devastating successes of foreign agents - Roosevelt's Secret War is a compulsively readable, thoroughly entertaining work of history.

Joseph Persico also collaborated with former Secretary of State Colin Powell on the biographical My American Journey. His most recent book is Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax.

He and his wife, Sylvia La Vista Persico, have two children, Vanya and Andrea.