PANEL with Moderator Margaret Carlson - A Letter from Washington

Margaret Carlson is best known for being the first female columnist at Time magazine. Carlson joined Time in January 1988 from The New Republic, where she had been managing editor; in 1994, she became the first female columnist in the magazine's history. Carlson covered four presidential elections for TIME, but in 2005 she left for Bloomberg News where she writes a column.

Carlson spent a year after college working at the U.S. Department of Labor and three other agencies. During that year she lived on Yuma Street in Anacostia with her grandmother Nellie McCreary, a maid at the Hotel Washington (Washington, D.C.) and former nurse's aide at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. After that she taught third grade in Watts, Los Angeles, before joining Nader's raiders. After law school, she was briefly a Federal Trade Commission lawyer under Michael Pertschuk, until the Carter administration ended.

John Dimitri Negroponte is an American diplomat. He is currently a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a former J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Prior to this appointment, he served as a research fellow and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, United States Deputy Secretary of State (2007-2009), and the first ever Director of National Intelligence (2005-2007).

Negroponte served in the United States Foreign Service from 1960 to 1997. From 1981 to 1996, he had tours of duty as United States ambassador in Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines. After leaving the Foreign Service, he subsequently served in the Bush Administration as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 2001 to 2004, and was ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005. In November 2010, some of Negroponte's letters were released on the website WikiLeaks. 

Kathleen Parker is a center-right columnist for The Washington Post. Her columns are syndicated nationally and appear in more than 400 media outlets, both online and in print. Parker is a consulting faculty member at the Buckley School of Public Speaking, a popular guest on cable and network news programs and a regular guest on NBC's "Meet the Press" and MSNBC's "Hardball".

Parker describes herself politically as "mostly right of center" and was the highest-scoring conservative pundit in a 2012 retrospective study of pundit prediction accuracy in 2008. Parker urged the 2016 Electoral College electors to be "unfaithful" to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. 

Christopher Ruddy is the CEO of Newsmax Media, which publishes Newsmax.com and broadcasts the Newsmax TV network. A personal friend and staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, in April 2010, media-industry magazine Folio named Ruddy to its "Folio 40," an "annual list of magazine industry influencers". A conservative, Ruddy originally endorsed Jeb Bush during the 2016 election cycle. Ruddy was an early donor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as well as the Clinton campaign. The Washington Posthas referred to him as "the Trump Whisperer" as he has been supportive of Trump's policies and language on issues from immigration to global warming.

There will be a Members Only Cocktail Reception at Villa dei Fiori the evening before so members can meet the speakers.