John O’Sullivan
John O’Sullivan is an author and journalist. He is a senior fellow at National Review Institute. He spent the last four decades as a writer, columnist, and editor on news organizations and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently as the Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague and a Vice-President of the RFERL Corporation. He stepped down from this position in December 2011.
Mr. O’Sullivan is also an editor at large of National Review, where he served as the editor in chief for almost a decade.
His book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Regnery, September 2008), on the roles played by Pope John Paul II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher in the collapse of communism and the revival of Western market democracies, has been published in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian.
He has been a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute (2006 to 2009); editor of the distinguished foreign policy quarterly, The National Interest (2003 to 2005); and editor in chief of United Press International (2001 to 2003). From 1998 to 2001 he was an editorial consultant to Hollinger International Inc. and a leading member of the journalistic team that created the National Post, Canada’s first national newspaper.
He is the founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan effort dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies. The NAI was formally launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Vaclav Havel and Lady Thatcher. And it played a major role in bringing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into NATO.
Among his earlier posts Mr. O’Sullivan was the associate editor of The (London) Times (in charge of the editorial and op-ed pages) from 1986 to 1987; editorial page editor of the New York Post from 1984 to 1986; assistant editor and parliamentary sketch-writer for The (London) Daily Telegraph for two periods (1972-79 and 1983-84); and London Correspondent for Radio Telefis Eireann, Ireland’s state broadcasting corporation, where he received his journalistic training. He has been a regular center-page columnist for The (London) Daily Telegraph, The (London) Times, The (London) Independent, the Toronto Sun, the (Canadian) National Post, The (Toronto) Globe and Mail, and The Australian.
Mr. O’Sullivan has held several positions in the world of think tanks. In addition to his fellowship at the Hudson Institute, he was Director of Studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington (1979-83), where he was editor of Policy Review. Later he held a senior fellowship at the Nixon Center, 2003-2005, where he edited The National Interest.
In 1987 and 1988 he served as a Special Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, covering health and social security, defense procurement, and the arts. During this period and after he left Downing Street, he served informally as a regular speechwriter for the Prime Minister. He was the principal author of the 1987 Conservative election manifesto. Later he was one of the small team that assisted Lady Thatcher in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. And for several years in the 1990s, he served both as an informal advisor to Lady Thatcher and as a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Thatcher Foundations.
He commutes between the world and the family home in Alabama where he lives with his wife and two step-daughters.