James K. Glassman (born January 1, 1947, in Washington, D.C.) is an American conservative[1] editorialist, journalist, diplomat and author. He is currently the host of the television program Ideas in Action, which airs on PBS member stations across the country. On December 11, 2007 Glassman was nominated by President George W. Bush to replace Karen Hughes as the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy.[2] In 2007, Glassman became Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent federal agency that provides programming about America to non-American overseas audiences via the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Marti). Earlier he founded The American, the magazine of ideas for business leaders, published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and was its editor-in-chief and from 2005 to 2007. He is a frequent commentator on business and investing issues, and has been published in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic Monthly, Reader's Digest, and The Times Literary Supplement (London). His is the co-author of Dow 36,000, which incorrectly predicted a drastic increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
On September 3, 2009, it was announced that Glassman will head the George W. Bush Institute, a public policy institute at the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The Institute will be located at Southern Methodist University.[3]
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Glassman attended private Quaker school, Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, DC, and graduated cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in government in 1969.
Glassman (with Virginia Postrel) wrote an oft-cited rejoinder to a call for a conservative policy of "national greatness" by Bill Kristol and David Brooks.
In Dow 36,000, published in 1999, near the peak of the late 1990s stock market bubble, Glassman and his co-author declared that the stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, then around 10,000, were undervalued and that the stock prices would rise sharply, with the index reaching 36,000 within three to five years. In its introduction, Glassman and his co-author wrote that the book "will convince you of the single most important fact about stocks at the dawn of the twenty-first century: They are cheap....If you are worried about missing the market's big move upward, you will discover that it is not too late. Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground–to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones industrial average."[6].
Glassman remains unrepentant for what many feel was a poorly researched book. Asked by Washington Post reporter Carlos Lozada "You don't feel the need to apologize to someone who read your book, went in and got creamed?", Glassman replied with only two words, "Absolutely not".[7]
In 2011, he wrote "I was wrong" about his predictions in Dow 36,000, noting that the Dow Jones only went up 20% since publication of the book and returns during the intervening years were only "a few piddling percentage points."[8]
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