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John Gans is the Director of Communications and Research at Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s new global policy center. In addition to helping build Perry World House, Gans teaches graduate and undergraduate students on the international order, the politics and process of American foreign policy, and national security. He is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Leveraging nearly 80 policymakers and more than 10,000 original documents from nine presidential libraries and archives, Gans wrote White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War, out May 14, 2019 from Liveright a division of W.W. Norton. White House Warriors is a revelatory history written with riveting DC insider detail. Called “a must-read for anyone interested in how Washington really works,” the book shows how the NSC Staff has evolved from a collection of administrative clerks to, as one recent commander-in-chief called them, the president’s “personal band of warriors.”
Until 2017, Gans was the chief speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at the Pentagon. He served as the principal advisor to the secretary on planning, positioning, and preparation of remarks, managed a team of writers, and drafted dozens of speeches delivered around the world on defense policy, the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and more. In addition to leading the writing team at the Defense Department, Gans served in the Obama Administration as senior speechwriter for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew.
In the wake of the September 11th attacks, Gans served as a press liaison at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan where he helped brief the press on behalf of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The experience drove his interest in public service and national security. In the years since, Gans worked with Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and more. He also joined the U.S. Navy reserve in 2010, and currently serves a lieutenant assigned to the Pentagon.
Gans has a long affiliation with the Johns Hopkins University. He earned his MA (2009) and PhD (2014) from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), defended his dissertation on White House strategic decision-making during war with honors, and has taught in several of its graduate programs. Gans received his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.
He lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey with his wife, Anjuli Srivastava Gans, who is a pediatrician, and their two sons.
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