Ernest W. Lefever

Ernest Warren Lefever (November 12, 1919 – July 29, 2009) was an American political theorist and foreign affairs expert who founded the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976 and was nominated for a State Department post by President Ronald Reagan, but withdrew after his nomination was rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Lefever was born in York, Pennsylvania on November 12, 1919. He grew up in a pacifist tradition and was ordained as a minister in the Church of the Brethren. He attended Elizabethtown College, graduating in 1942. He attended Yale Divinity School, where he was awarded a degree in 1945, later receiving a doctoral degree in Christian ethics from the school, in 1956.

Immediately following World War II, Lefever worked for three years with prisoners of war from Nazi Germany being held by the allied forces as a representative of the World's Alliance of YMCAs. While there, a visit to the remains of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp turned him into a self-described "humane realist", with his sight of "scattered rib bones in the red clay" convincing him of the tangibility of evil. He took a bone from the camp which he would show at lectures to explain his transformation. Professionally, Lefever had served as a foreign affairs consultant to Hubert H. Humphrey when he was in the United States Senate, in a similar role with the National Council of Churches and as a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution.

...
Wikipedia