Everyone who knew him has been shocked by the news that Ted Halstead, a founder of New America and pioneer of many other causes and organizations, has died in the past few days in a hiking accident in Spain. He had recently turned 52.
Accidental deaths are by definition shocking, but intensely so in Ted’s case, because he has seemed to personify youth and promise. At age 25, he founded a group called Redefining Progress, designed to examine the equity, sustainability, and inclusiveness of economic growth. This led to a cover story in The Atlantic two years later, by Ted, Jonathan Rowe, and Clifford Cobb, with the prescient title, “If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?”
In 1998, just after he turned 30, Ted was a co-founder (with Michael Lind, Walter Russell Mead, and Sherle Schwenninger) and the first CEO of the New America Foundation, now known as New America. It was because of New America that I met Ted in that summer of 1998. I had just been cashiered from a doomed journalism job (news magazine editor, for an owner who routinely ran through editors), and was about to go to work in the software business. Ted called to introduce himself and ask if I would join the New America cause. I served as board chairman over the next dozen years, before moving to China, and spent much of the first few years going with Ted on fundraising missions to get this think tank off the ground.
New America flourished; Ted was an influential speaker and author, with two books and a number of pieces for The Atlantic(and elsewhere). After an intense, nonstop ten years in this role, he left New America (succeeded by Steve Coll, and then Anne-Marie Slaughter) and stepped aside from the world of dawn-to-dusk meetings with legislators, presentations at conferences, sessions with New America’s growing ranks of researchers, and trips to the green rooms of cable-news shows. Instead, he spent nearly five years sailing around the world in a small catamaran with his wife, Veronique.
In 2012 they sold the boat and settled in Majorca, to start a family. My wife, Deb, and I frequently talked about when we would go visit them—and kept putting it off. Then in 2016, while in his 40s, Ted founded the Climate Leadership Council, whose idea (as with New America) was to bring together progressives and conservatives, business people and scientists and civic activists and others, all to promote policies of decarbonization and sustainability measures. That was the center of his speaking, writing, and organizing activity until his sudden death.
Successful entrepreneurs, founders, visionaries, leaders—they have a certain personality that is different from the rest of us. They talk big, they dream big, they promise big, and the best get others to believe along with them. Ted Halstead was one of the best. From an early age, he thought, talked, promised, and achieved on a very big scale. I am very glad to have known and worked with him, and I hope his example will inspire many others.