Blinken was born to Jewish parents, Judith and Donald M. Blinken. He attended the Dalton School in New York City until 1971, when he moved to Paris, France, with his divorced mother and her new husband, lawyer Samuel Pisar, who had survived both the Auschwitz and Dachau camps in the Holocaust. He attended Harvard University, where he edited the daily student newspaper and co-edited the weekly art magazine. After earning his bachelor's degree, Blinken reported for The New Republic. He earned his J.D. degree at Columbia Law School. After graduation, he practiced law in New York City and Paris. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Blinken worked with his father in fundraisers for Michael Dukakis.
Career
Blinken has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations over two decades. He served on the United States National Security Council staff at the White House from 1994 to 2001. From 1994 through 1998 Blinken was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Strategic Planning and NSC Senior Director for Speechwriting. From 1999 to 2001 he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Canadian Affairs. In 2002 Blinken was appointed Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position he served in until 2008. He was also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 2008, Blinken worked for the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, and was a member of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition team. From 2009 to 2013 he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President. In this position he also helped craft U.S. policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Iranian nuclear program. In 2017, Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategic advising firm, with Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda. WestExec's client work includes analyzing potential acquisitions and investments for geopolitical risk, and offering insight on regulatory matters, policy changes in the U.S. and key international markets, industry-specific and macroeconomic trends, political intelligence. WestExec also helps clients expand market access in China "while safeguarding against trade tensions between the U.S. and China". WestExec's clients have included Google's Jigsaw, Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward, and "“Fortune 100 types.” In an interview with The Intercept, Flournoy explained WestExec seeks to employ "people recently coming out of government" with "current knowledge, expertise, contacts, networks". Blinken is also a partner of private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners. According to the firm's website, Blinken works on the D.C. partners team, which works "in tandem with the investment team to source deals, conduct analyses, win bids, close transactions, and directly advise" the firm's portfolio companies. Pine Island's chairman is John Thain, the final chairman of Merrill Lynch before its sale to Bank of America. Blinken recused himself from Pine Island Capital Partners in 2020 to serve as a senior foreign policy advisor with the Biden campaign. 's'' character Grover to talk about refugees at the United Nations in New York City, 2016. Blinken is a foreign policy advisor for Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. On June 17, 2020, Blinken said that Biden "would not tie military assistance to Israel to things like annexation or other decisions by the Israeli government with which we might disagree."
