Welcome to The Norfolk Forum Web Site

Founded in 1933, the Norfolk Forum is the oldest publicly-subscribed speakers' forum in the country. Each year in Norfolk's Chrysler Hall, the Forum presents four, thought-provoking public figures that in different ways help shape American thought and opinion. After each presentation, speakers engage the audience in a question and answer session.

We are pleased to announce that the 2012-13 series will feature Robert Gates (Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director), George Will (Pulitzer Prize winning columnist), Ted Mathas (Chairman and CEO of New York Life), and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer.) They will address topics as diverse as world affairs, public policy, education, and popular culture.

To purchase tickets, please visit the Tickets section of this website. Tickets are only available on a full-season basis, tickets are not available for only an individual speaker. The price of the four-speaker series is $120, net of processing fees for on-line purchases.

We hope that you choose to join us at the upcoming season of the Norfolk Forum. We look forward to another very exciting series. As we proudly claim, it's the best ticket in town.

William M. Furr, President

 

2012-2013 Speakers
Programs are held at 8:15 pm in Chrysler Hall, Norfolk.

ROBERT GATES
Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director and current Chancellor of the College of William and Mary
October 3, 2012 – 8:15 p.m.

Dr. Robert M. Gates served as the 22nd Secretary of Defense (2006-2011) and is the only Secretary of Defense in U.S. history to be asked to remain in that office by a newly-elected President. President Barack Obama is the eighth president Gates has served. He previously served under President George W. Bush.

On Gates' last day in office, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.

Before becoming Secretary of Defense in 2006, Gates was the president of Texas A&M University, the nation's seventh largest university. Prior to assuming the Texas A&M presidency, on August 1, 2002, he served as interim dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M from 1999 to 2001.

Gates joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1966 and spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence professional. During that period, he spent nearly nine years at the National Security Council, The White House, serving four presidents of both political parties.

Gates served as director of Central Intelligence from 1991 until 1993. He is the only career officer in CIA's history to rise from entry-level employee to director. He served as deputy director of Central Intelligence from 1986 until 1989 and as assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser at the White House from January 20, 1989 until November 6, 1991 for President George H. W. Bush.

Gates has been awarded the National Security Medal, the Presidential Citizens Medal, has three times received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, and has three times received CIA's highest award, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

He is the author of the memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insiders Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, published in 1996.

Until becoming Secretary of Defense, Gates served as chairman of the Independent Trustees of The Fidelity Funds, the nation's largest mutual fund company, and on the b board of directors of NACCO Industries, Inc., Brinker International, Inc. and Parker Drilling Company, Inc.

Gates has also served on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the American Council on Education, the Board of Directors of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. He has also been president of the National Eagle Scout Association.

A native of Kansas, Gates received his bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary, his master's degree in history from Indiana University and his doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University. Gates was installed as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary beginning in February 2012. He was the first William and Mary alumnus in the modern era to serve as Chancellor of the College.

In 1967, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and served as an intelligence officer at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

 

GEORGE WILL
Pulitzer Prize Winning Columnist
January 15, 2013 – 8:15 p.m.

George F. Will is today's most widely read columnist. His newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974. Today it appears twice weekly in approximately 400 newspapers in the United States and in Europe. In 1976, he became a regular contributing editor of Newsweek magazine, for which he provided a bimonthly essay until 2011.

In 1977, he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his newspaper columns. Altogether eight collections of Will's Newsweek and Washington Post columns have been published, the most recent being One Man's America. In 1990, Will published Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball, which topped The New York Times best-seller list for two months and was most recently reissued on April 13, 2012 as a 20th Anniversary special edition with a new introduction (paperback). In 1998, Scribner published Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden yards, Pete Rose and Other Reflections on Baseball, a best-selling collection of new and previously published writing by Will on baseball. Will was a member of Major League Baseball's Blue Ribbon Panel, examining baseball economics.

In 1981, Will became a founding panel member on ABC television's This Week. Will was born in Champaign, Illinois, educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Oxford University and Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. He has taught political philosophy at Michigan State University, the University of Toronto and Harvard University. Will served as a staff member in the United States Senate from 1970 to 1972. From 1973 to 1976, he was the Washington editor of National Review magazine. Today, Will lives and works in Washington.

 

TED MATHAS
Chairman and CEO of New York Life
February 26, 2013 – 8:15 p.m.

Ted Mathas is chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of New York Life Insurance Company, the largest mutual life insurer in the United States with more than $335 billion in assets under management. Mathas is responsible for running all aspects of this Fortune 100 company, including its domestic and international business operations. The domestic side includes life insurance, retirement income, investment management, long-term care insurance and other related businesses, as well as the company’s industry-leading career agency system. The international business includes operations in Asia and Latin America.

Mathas joined New York Life in 1995 and was promoted to positions of increasing responsibility in the ensuing years. In July 2007, he was named president by the company’s board of directors. He became chief executive officer a year later in July 2008. On June 1, 2009, Mathas was elected chairman of the board of directors, while retaining the title of president and CEO. He is also currently serving on the boards of the American Council of Life Insurers, where he is the industry chair for 2011-2012; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; The Financial Services Roundtable; the American Museum of Natural History; and the Norfolk Collegiate School.

At the helm of New York Life since the financial crisis began, Mathas has been navigating the organization through the most challenging economic period since the Great Depression. Setting the tone for his leadership early on, shortly after the markets collapsed in the fall of 2008, New York Life publicly declared that it was “built for times like these” and that it did not need – or want – any tax-payer funded bailouts or assistance. Rallying the support of both agents and employees, Mathas has guided New York Life to some of its most successful years in its 167-year history, marked by noteworthy achievements that included generating record earnings in three of the past four years; retaining the highest financial strength credit ratings currently awarded to any life insurer by A.M. Best, Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s; selling more individual life insurance and capturing more market share over the past three years than any other insurer in America; and being recognized as Fortune magazine’s “World’s Most Admired” life insurance company in 2009.

A 1985 Norfolk Collegiate School graduate, Mathas went on to earn an A.B. from Stanford University, with distinction, in 1989. He received a J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1992, where he was a member of the Virginia Law Review and Order of the Coif. He and his wife, Keryn, live in Armonk, New York, with their three children.

 

 

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian and Biographer
April 30, 2013 – 8:15 p.m.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, world-renowned historian, has been reporting on politics and baseball for over two decades. Goodwin is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. She appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns' The History of Baseball. She was the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.

Goodwin was born and raised on Long Island, New York. She received her B.A. from Colby College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where she taught Government including a course on the American Presidency. Following her tenure at Harvard, Goodwin served as an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs.

In 1976, Goodwin authored Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream, which became a New York Times best-seller. She followed up in 1987 with the political biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which stayed on The New York Times Best-Seller List for five months. In 1990, it was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries. Her next book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995, as well as the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award and the Washington Monthly Book Award. It was a New York Times best seller for six months.

Goodwin's book, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, published in 1997, is about growing up in the 1950's in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It has been a New York Times best-seller, as well as a Book of the Month Club selection. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, "This is a book in the grand tradition of girlhood memoirs, dating from Louisa May Alcott to Carson McCullers and Harper Lee."

Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, published in October 2005, joined the best-seller lists on its first week in publication, and soon reached #1 on The New York Times Best-Seller List. Team of Rivals won the 2006 Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president and/or the Civil War, the New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Richard Nelson Current awards and the New york State Archives History Makers Award. When President Obama was asked if he could only bring one book to the White House other than the Bible what would it be, he said Team of Rivals. A feature film based on Team of Rivals, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln will be out in December 2012. She is currently at work on a new book about the progressive era: Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft and the golden age of journalism.

Goodwin is married to Richard Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both Kennedy and Johnson. Mr. Goodwin's experience as the investigator who uncovered the quiz show scandals of the 1950s was captured in the Academy Award-nominated movie Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford. The Goodwin's have three sons.

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