FOR ANTHONY LAKE, A 30-YEAR CAREER IN FOREIGN POLICY

(Profile: Clinton's national security adviser) (530)
By Paul Malamud, USIA Staff Writer
Washington -- President-elect Clinton's choice for White House national
security adviser -- one of the most important foreign policy positions in
the U.S. government -- brings considerable experience to the job.
Fifty-three-year old Anthony Lake first entered the U.S. Foreign Service in
1962 and has been active in foreign policy circles since then.

Like Clinton, Lake is part of the idealistic generation shaped by the
Kennedy presidency of the early 1960's, as well as by the war in Vietnam.
Lake's idealism came to the fore when he resigned his job as an assistant
to Henry Kissinger in 1970 in order to protest the Nixon administration's
extension of Vietnam war combat into Cambodia.

However, Lake's extensive State Department experience and his considerable
scholarly involvement in international affairs should also help him bring a
hard-nosed appreciation of the realities of power to the job.

Born in 1939 in New York City, Lake received his bachelor's degree from
Harvard and studied economics at Cambridge University in England for two
years. He has received a doctoral degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

in 1962, Lake joined the Foreign Service, and was posted to Vietnam, where
he became a special assistant to then-ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.
Singled out early for his talent, Lake rose quickly to become an aide to
Secretary of State Kissinger in 1969, accompanying the secretary on his
first secret meeting with North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris. In 1970,
he had a falling out with Kissinger over the Nixon administration's
extension of the war to Cambodia and later wrote a book critical of
Kissinger's approach to Africa.

In 1977, Lake became head of the State Department's policy planning
operation in the administration of Jimmy Carter. In that position, he
reported directly to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and was witness to the
bureaucratic maneuvering that went on between Vance and Carter's national
security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president, Lake withdrew into academia,
becoming a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts. In 1984, he
moved to Mount Holyoke College, where he has taught courses in the Vietnam
War, Third World revolutions, and American foreign policy. During the 1992
presidential campaign, he was one of candidate Clinton's chief foreign
policy advisers. (Clinton and Lake had worked together in the 1972
presidential campaign of George McGovern.) Lake is also an old friend of
Warren Christopher, Clinton's choice for secretary of state.

Lake's published works include "The 'Tar Baby' Option: American Policy
Toward Southern Rhodesia," (1976); "Third World Radical Regimes: U.S.
Policy Under Carter and Reagan," (1985); and "Somoza Falling: A Case
Study of Washington at Work," (1990). In addition, he helped found the
influential journal "Foreign Policy."

Lake has been referred to in the press as a "creative and imaginative
thinker." He is known as a skillful bureaucratic conciliator and is
thought to favor a strong United Nations as a multilateral vehicle for
solving international problems.