Philip Lader, the former US Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, is chairman of the WPP plc advertising/marketing services company (including Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, Grey Global, Burson-Marsteller, and Hill & Knowlton, with 160,000 people in 108 countries). He is also a senior adviser to Morgan Stanley, partner in the Nelson, Mullins, Riley & Scarborough law firm, and a member of the boards of Marathon Oil, AES, and RusAl Corporations, several private equity portfolio companies, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Atlantic Council, and the Salzburg Global Seminar.
A member of President Clinton's Cabinet, he also served as White House deputy chief of staff, assistant to the president, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, and administrator of the US Small Business Administration. He was formerly executive vice president of Anglo-French financier Sir James Goldsmith's holdings (including America's then-largest private landholdings), as well as president of Sea Pines Company and universities in Australia and South Carolina, and a member of the boards of Lloyd's of London, Songbird plc (Canary Wharf), the British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral Foundation, and the American Red Cross.
Ambassador Lader was educated at Duke University (Phi Beta Kappa), the University of Michigan (MA-history), Oxford University (graduate law studies), and Harvard Law School. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has been awarded honorary doctorates by 14 universities.
He is married to Linda LeSourd Lader, a Presbyterian minister, with whom he co-founded (and continues to host) Renaissance Weekends, the non-partisan retreats for innovative leaders from diverse fields. Their elder daughter graduated from Brown in 2008, and their younger daughter graduated in 2011.
