Biden to Deliver Eizenstat Lecture
Vice President Joe Biden will speak at Ahavath Achim Synagogue on Thursday, Sept. 3, in the 27th Fran Eizenstat and Eizenstat Family Annual Lecture.
The vice president’s topic will be “Challenges Facing the U.S. and the World in the 21st Century” when he speaks at 7:30 p.m. in the free, public event.
The 72-year-old was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware in 1972 when he was 29 and was re-elected six times before resigning to serve as President Barack Obama’s vice president in 2009.
Biden, who first flirted with a run for president in the 1988 election cycle, has not ruled out a Democratic presidential campaign in 2016. George H.W. Bush is the only sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.
One previous Eizenstat Lecture speaker is in the 2016 race: Democratic front-runner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The 25 other Eizenstat lecturers have included two former U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; a former vice president, Al Gore; two former Israeli prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert; two other former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright; and two Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
Last year’s speaker was New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
The lecture series attracts such prominent speakers because of its founder, Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, a lifelong AA member who held high-level positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations and leads the international practice of the law firm Covington & Burling in Washington.
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