Max Boot (born September 12, 1969) is an American author, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Since then, he has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has also written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party", in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Personal life Boot was born in Moscow. His parents and grandmother, all Russian-Jews, fled from the Soviet Union in 1976 as refugees and moved to Los Angeles, where he was raised and eventually gained naturalized U.S. citizenship. Boot attended the University of California, Berkeley where he graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1991 and Yale University with an MA in Diplomatic History in 1992. He began his career in journalism writing columns for the Berkeley student newspaper The Daily Californian. He later claimed that he believes he is the only conservative writer in that paper's history. , Boot and his family lived in the New York area. Career Boot has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He has blogged regularly for Commentary since 2007, and for several years on its blog page called Contentions. He has given lectures at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College. Boot worked as a writer and as an editor for The Christian Science Monitor from 1992 to 1994. He moved to The Wall Street Journal for the next eight years. After writing an investigative column about legal issues called "Rule of Law" for four years, he was promoted to editor of the op-ed page.