Dr. Alice Rivlin, an economist and former cabinet officer, is a nationally recognized expert on fiscal and monetary policy. She earned her doctorate at Harvard, and later served as Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson....

Doug Marlette (1949-2007) was a celebrated American cartoonist, playwright and novelist. Born in Hillsborough, North Carolina, he began drawing newspaper cartoons when he was 16. At 22 he was editorial cartoonist for the Charlotte Observer. He moved to the Atlanta Constitution, where he...

Donald E. Graham became chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company in May 1991 and chairman of the board in September 1993. He was publisher of The Post from January 1979 until September 2000 and chairman of the newspaper from September 2000 to February 2008. Graham was...

Live presentations by the leaders, visionaries and pioneers who have helped shape our world. Learn how the core principles of passion, vision, preparation, courage, perseverance and integrity helped these leaders shape their achievements and their lives. Discover how to apply these...

Samuel Zell is a real estate entrepreneur. He is Chairman of Equity Group Investments (EGI), the private, entrepreneurial investment firm he founded more than 40 years ago. EGI's investments span industries and continents, and include interests in real estate, energy, logistics,...

Dr. Steven Chu is the United States Secretary of Energy. A distinguished scientist, he received the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light. Prior to his appointment by President Barack Obama in 2009, he was professor of physics,...

Wayne Thiebaud is a painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the...

Born in the Free City of Danzig in 1927, Professor Rosovsky received his A.B degree in 1949 from the College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1959. He taught economics, history and Japanese and Korean studies at the University of California at Berkeley until 1965....

Paul Fireman founded Reebok USA in 1979 and as of mid-2004 had been the company's only CEO. Reebok USA was formed when Fireman, attending a sporting goods trade show in London, bought the rights to the Reebok line of custom running shoes from the British shoe company J. W. Foster &...

Dominick Dunne (1925 - 2009) won fame as an author and investigative journalist after a previous career as a motion picture producer and studio executive. Born to a prominent family in Hartford, Connecticut, he was one of six children. The novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne was...

Lesley Stahl has been co-editor of 60 Minutes since March 1991. This season marks her 11th on the broadcast and her first season as anchor of 48 Hours Investigates. Stahl has had a remarkable year reporting for 60 Minutes. She made headlines last June with her interview of indicted...

Executives at Paramount had so little faith in the 32 year-old filmmaker they had hired to direct The Godfather, they actually hired another director to follow Francis Ford Coppola around the set, just to remind him he could be replaced at any moment. Despite studio interference, Coppola...

Scott Turow is an author and a practicing lawyer. He has written several legal thrillers such as The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, Pleading Guilty, and Personal Injuries, which Time Magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999. All four became bestsellers, and Turow won...

Gordon Gund is businessman and professional sports owner. He is the CEO of Gund Investment Corporation. He is the former co-owner of the San Jose Sharks (National Hockey League) and former principal owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers (National Basketball Association) and is currently a...

Edna Buchanan was heralded as the best police-beat reporter in the United States and one of the nation’s first female crime journalists, when she wrote for the Miami newspapers. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for general reporting. A high school graduate who worked wiring switchboards...

In 1966, anxious for a business of his own, George Gillett invested in the Miami Dolphins and became the team’s business manager. In 1968, with two partners, he bought the Harlem Globetrotters. In 1975, he sold his stake in the Globetrotters for $3 million and began looking for troubled...

Dr. Leonard L. Bailey is the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Loma Linda University and Medical Center and a heart transplant pioneer. Bailey is a daring and skilled surgeon who implanted the heart of a baboon into an infant known as Baby Fae, who lived 21 days after the...

Bob Feller was born and raised in Van Meter, Iowa. His father ran the family farm, and his mother was a registered nurse and a teacher. Feller credited his arm strength and ball speed to milking cows, picking corn, and baling hay. He recalled his childhood fondly: "What kid wouldn't enjoy...

Harold Elliot Varmus is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the 14th and current Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post he was appointed to by President Barack Obama. He was a co-recipient (along with J. Michael Bishop) of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for...

Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1934, Jim Lehrer received an A.A. degree from Victoria College and a B.J. in 1956 from the University of Missouri before joining the Marine Corps. From 1959 to 1966, he was a reporter for The Dallas Morning News and then the Dallas Times-Herald. He was also a...

In the early 1960s, James Rosenquist emerged as a leader of the Pop Art movement, employing the techniques of advertising illustration and the imagery of popular culture to provoke sharp questions about the nature of a society steeped in consumerism and mass-produced images. Through...

Ben Bradlee served as the executive editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1991 where he became a national figure during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when he challenged the federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers and oversaw the publication of Bob Woodward...

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is of the most beloved writers of our time whose books are published in more than thirty languages. He was born in the Bronx, a child who grew up in a family where reading was an essential part of life. After college, Doctorow wrote in his spare time while working...

Sidney Sheldon (February 11, 1917 – January 30, 2007) was a master storyteller and one of the best-selling novelists in the world. He was born Sidney Schechtel in Chicago, into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. During the Great Depression, he worked at a variety of jobs and attended...

Beverly Sills (May 25, 1929 – July 2, 2007) was one of the beloved personalities in the history of opera, and one of the most important sopranos of the 20th century. Sills was born Belle Miriam Silverman, the daughter of an insurance company manager from Brooklyn. She was singing on the...

Tom Brokaw was the longtime anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004, and is the author of the best-selling "The Greatest Generation" about the American citizens who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II and went on to build modern America....

A nationally syndicated columnist for The New York Times for more than 30 years, Russell Wayne Baker was one of America’s most respected and successful humorists. Baker was born in the backwoods of Virginia. At age 11, as a “self-professed bump on a log,” he made the decision to become a...

Dr. Rene Geronimo Favaloro (July 12, 1923 – July 29, 2000) was an Argentine cardiac surgeon who developed the coronary bypass operation. In 1967, Favaloro became the first surgeon to perform a coronary bypass surgery, a medical procedure that became the most important technique in...

Vincent J. Scully is Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and one of the world's leading architectural historians and critics. He entered Yale at age 16, earned his degree in 1940, his master's in 1947, and his doctorate in 1949. Scully...

Nixon is the premier storyteller in the history of daytime television, and the creator of beloved soap operas such as "One Life to Live" and "All My Children." Raised in Nashville, as the only child of divorced parents in an Irish-Catholic enclave, she experienced more tears than joy. She...

Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." The book's title is a phrase from the Quran: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," which Osama bin Laden quoted three times in a videotaped speech as...

In 1998, an article by Dr. Craig Mello, published in the journal Nature, ignited a revolution in biomedical research. The discovery swept through laboratories around the world, changing the way biomedical researchers work in fields from medicine to agriculture. Science had already...

The American literary world offers no greater award than the Pulitzer Prize. In 1969 the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to House Made of Dawn, a first novel from an unknown author. This was unusual enough; even more surprisingly, to some observers, the winner was a Kiowa Indian who had...

Elizabeth Ann Bloomer Warren Ford (1918 - 2011), better known as Betty Ford, was First Lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977. Her husband, Gerald R. Ford, was the 37th President of the United States. As First Lady, Mrs. Ford was active in social policy and shattered precedents as a...

Mortimer J. Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was a philosopher, editor, educator, and prolific author. The son of an immigrant jewelry salesman, Adler dropped out of school at age 14 to become a copy boy for the New York Sun. He hoped to become a journalist, and decided a few...

George Kozmetsky (October 5, 1917 – April 30, 2003) was a technology innovator, businessman, educator, author, and philanthropist. Kozmetsky was the co-founder of Teledyne, and he was the dean of The University of Texas Graduate School of Business for 16 years, where he revolutionized the...

Dr. Henry Jay Heimlich is a controversial American physician who is the inventor of abdominal thrusts to rescue a choking-victim, more commonly known as the "Heimlich Maneuver." A graduate of Cornell Medical College in 1943, he first published his views about the maneuver in 1947 in an...

At the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C., the Academy of Achievement presented a panel discussion with social entrepreneurs who have founded nonprofit organizations to provide quality education or nutrition to disadvantaged youth. The panel includes Teach for...

Dr. William C. DeVries is an American cardiothoracic surgeon who performed the first successful permanent artificial heart implantation on December 2, 1982. DeVries was the son of a Dutch immigrant father who served as a surgeon in the U.S. Navy during World War II. William DeVries was...

Bob Galvin (1922 - 2011) was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Motorola, where he helped shepherd in a new era in computing and telecommunications that transformed American society. A veteran of 50 years of service, courage, and dedication to the company founded by his father,...

Arlene Violet is the former Attorney General of the State of Rhode Island, who was an energetic, outspoken, no nonsense "protector of citizen's rights." A former nun in the Sisters of Mercy religious order for 23 years, she entered the convent at age 18, and taught at an inner-city...

William G. McGowan (December 10, 1927 – June 8, 1992) was a famed American entrepreneur who challenged the AT&T phone monopoly – and revolutionized the telecommunications industry – as the Founder and Chairman of MCI Communications Corporation. He graduated from Harvard Business School...

Chuck Yeager made history in 1947 as the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. But even before he broke the sound barrier, Yeager's exploits had made him a legend among his fellow flyers. Shot down over occupied France during World War II, the wounded flyer successfully evaded...

Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole made history in 1987, when she became the first African-American woman to serve as President of Spelman College. Ever since it was founded, Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia has been the nation's foremost institution of higher education specifically intended for...

When Willie Brown was growing up in the 1940s, the African-Americans of rural East Texas lived in poverty. The daily humiliations of segregation were enforced by the constant threat of violence. In the summer of 1951, a 17 year-old Willie Brown left the world he knew and boarded a train...

Kent Weeks was only eight years old when he fell under the spell of ancient Egypt. As unlikely as it must have seemed for a boy growing up in the Pacific Northwest, he dreamed of becoming an Egyptologist, and was encouraged in his interest by sympathetic teachers. At age 12 he began to...

Dr. Herbert W. Boyer and Robert A. Swanson (1947 – 1999) co-founded Genentech in 1976 and launched the biotechnology revolution. It remains one of the leading biotech companies in the world. Boyer was a Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the University of California Medical School...

Brigadier General Robert F. McDermott (July 13, 1920 – August 28, 2006) was the Board Chairman and CEO of USAA, and first permanent Dean of Faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy, who was acclaimed as the "Father of Modern Military Education." He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in...

Shirley Jane Temple began her film career at the age of three, and in 1934, skyrocketed to superstardom in "Bright Eyes," a feature film designed specifically for her talents. Her signature song "On the Good Ship Lollipop" was introduced in the film and sold 500,000 sheet music copies. She...

Roy M. Huffington (October 4, 1917 – July 11, 2008) was the founder and chairman of Huffco, one of the most successful independent international oil and gas companies in the nation. He was a legend in the world's oil patches and boardrooms. His father, an oilman, died in an accident when...