Tom Malinowski interned for New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley. He went west for university and earned a Rhodes Scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked for New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then left to earn an M.Phil. from Oxford. He worked for the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and then the Ford Foundation. He worked in the State Department writing speeches for Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madelaine Albright. Under Clinton he became Senior Director of the National Security Council managing international communications and writing foreign policy speeches for the President. With Democrats out of office, he became the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. For over a decade, he was a leading opponent of the US use of torture, of tyranny in Myanmar, and of groups like the Taliban.