John Shattuck is Chief Executive Officer of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and Senior Fellow and Lecturer at the College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. Shattuck’s career spans more than three decades of leadership in higher education, international diplomacy, foreign policy and human rights. He appears frequently in the U.S. and international media and as a speaker and commentator on human rights and international security. He is the author of Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response (Harvard University Press), Rights of Privacy (National Textbook Company) and many articles on international affairs, national security, foreign policy, human rights, civil liberties, higher education and public service.
Under Shattuck’s leadership since 2001, the Kennedy Library Foundation has dramatically increased the visibility and programmatic support of the Kennedy Library. Over the last six years the Library has greatly expanded its educational programs and museum exhibits, and has conducted more than a hundred and fifty public conferences and forums, most of which have been broadcast on radio and television. These include the highly acclaimed 15-part post-9/11 series, “Responding to Terrorism”; a 10-session exploration of domestic and international human rights issues, “Seeking Common Ground: Civil Rights and Human Rights,” supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; a multi-part forum series, “Containing Weapons of Mass Destruction,” sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation; a set of programs on “Challenges in Iraq,” supported by Carnegie; and a series of meetings in the U.S. and the Middle East, “Covering Conflict,” bringing together groups of Israeli, Palestinian and Northern Irish journalists, supported by the Carnegie and the Ford Foundations.
In 1993 Shattuck was nominated by President Clinton and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He served in this position for five years and played a leadership role in efforts to end the war in Bosnia and negotiate the Dayton Peace Agreement, establish the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, restore a democratically-elected government to Haiti, administer U. S. assistance to new and emerging democracies and raise the profile of human rights in U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War. For this work he received the International Human Rights Award from the United Nations Association of Boston in 1998.
In 1998 Shattuck was again nominated for a major foreign affairs position by the President and confirmed by the Senate, this time as U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Ambassador Shattuck’s role in this pivotal Central European country, which has undergone a challenging transition from communism to democracy, included helping the Czechs become new members of NATO and participants in Balkan peacekeeping, developing programs to assist in overhauling the legal system and building the rule of law in the Czech Republic, and working with Czech educators to support innovative civic education programs in the country’s schools and universities. He received the Ambassador’s Award from the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Institute in 2000.
Before entering government service, Shattuck was at Harvard, where he was Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs from 1984 to 1993, Lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and Research Associate at the Kennedy School of Government. A founder of the Cambridge Partnership for Public Education, Shattuck worked to expand Harvard’s role in assisting the Cambridge and Boston public schools, including the creation of a new program of fellowships for Cambridge and Boston teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was also active in expanding Harvard’s public and community service programs involving students and faculty members. He received the Distinguished Service to Public Education Award in 1990 from the Massachusetts Board of Education, and the Yale Law School Public Service Award in 1988.
Shattuck’s career began at the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was Executive Director of the ACLU Washington office and national staff counsel from 1971 to 1984. He was involved in major civil rights and civil liberties issues during the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, including the defense of federal civil rights legislation, protection of the federal courts against congressional efforts to limit their jurisdiction, and legislative expansion of the rights of women. During and after the Watergate crisis he handled a number of prominent court cases on behalf of people who had been targets of illegal political surveillance; in 1976 he took the court-ordered deposition of Richard Nixon in the famous Halperin wiretap case. In 1984 he received the Roger Baldwin Award for his national contribution to civil liberties.
Shattuck was elected in 2007 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, serves on the board of directors of Common Cause, chairs the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Committee and the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Awards Committee, and serves as senior consultant to Atlantic Philanthropies. A graduate of Yale Law School, he received his BA from Yale College, Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and MA with First Class Honors in international law from Cambridge University. He has been awarded honorary degrees by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Kenyon College, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Western Bohemia in the Czech Republic. Tufts University honored him in 2003 with the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, and that year he led a delegation of peacekeeping experts to assess the United Nations mission in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shattuck is married to Ellen Hume, a journalist and teacher, and has four children.