Larry Tracy is a retired U.S. Army colonel with extensive speaking experience under difficult conditions. He formerly headed the Pentagon's top briefing team, responsible for daily intelligence presentations to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and other Defense Department officials. Because of his reputation for exceptional speaking skills, the State Department requested the Army to assign him to State for the specific purpose of defending and debating controversial foreign policy issues. He proceeded to speak and debate almost 400 times before some of the most demanding, even hostile, audiences in the country, leading then-President Ronald Reagan to… describe him as "an extraordinarily effective speaker."