Almost no one was listening. Those who were, including some of her colleagues at like-minded think tanks, warned Mathews to either start beating a war drum or pipe down.

“One person called me and said, ‘You’re crazy. This is going to happen,’ and he said he was already working on studies about post-invasion policy,” Mathews said. “And I said, ‘Well, I just think that’s really wrong.’

“Other people would say to me, ‘Well, it takes an awful lot of courage.’ To me, it didn’t really feel like courage. It felt like if you weren’t going to use what you knew then, in that context, then you had no business being here.

“The work we did then is what I’m proudest of in my 10 years here,” she said of her tenure at Carnegie. “It’s the real test.”

Five years later, with a majority of Americans saying they want U.S. forces to leave Iraq, Mathews is focused on the next test — to see whether Carnegie can become the world’s first truly global think tank. With centers in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, Brussels and Washington, and Web sites published in English, Chinese, Russian and Arabic, Carnegie hopes to provide the model of what can be done when smart people of many nations work together.

“The goal is to help American policymakers understand other places and also help other places to understand us,” said Karen DeYoung, a Washington Post national and foreign affairs writer who has been friends with Mathews for 30 years. “That’s a first, and that’s all her.”

“I would say she is on the cutting edge,” said Strobe Talbott, a foreign policy expert who heads the Brookings Institution, the famous think tank that sits next door to Carnegie, literally and politically. “She has definitely been a visionary. She has the ability to spot what is important in a complex situation and understand it clearly and explain it clearly. She cares very much about the facts and the ideas behind the policy.”

Foryears, Mathews said, Carnegie scholars have been writing that the United States, because it is the world’s dominant power, has a special responsibility to listen to other countries.

“What was so striking was that at this historical moment, when we have this greater need — because one superpower is a lot harder to swallow than two — we had probably the lowest-ever willingness to do that,” she said. “At a certain point you say, ‘We’ve got to do something more than write about it, because at some point it just begins to sound anti-American.’ One day it kind of struck us: Well, we could try to be it.”

So for the past four years, Carnegie has built on the success of its 15-year-old center in Moscow, opening new offices overseas staffed by local scholars who then visit Washington, bringing a credible and unique perspective to U.S. policymakers.

“Most of the really tough global problems — nonproliferation, climate change, trade, etc. — we can’t do it alone no matter how hard we try,” Mathews said. “We don’t succeed in what we want unless we have a policy that has followers.”

Don Kennedy, a former Stanford University president who serves on Carnegie’s board, said Carnegie has been able to influence that policy, even while being critical of the Bush administration, because Mathews tends to analyze differences “not from a partisan perspective but from a sense of what would be the right thing to do.”

“The new vision is really her vision,” he said.

The secret, Mathews said, is recruiting the very best researchers and writers. Carnegie also has made a commitment to language fluency that sets it apart from other Washington think tanks, she said.

“I don’t hire someone to be a ‘China expert’ who doesn’t speak Chinese,” she said, “because if you can’t read the newspapers, I don’t think you should be doing policy research.”

She also seeks out scholars who are engaged with the world, not tucked away in an ivory tower. “Some people can do a very good job of doing a piece of analysis, but they want to go off and close the door for two years,” she said. “They have to also be able to open the door and come out and get the results into people’s heads and hands, and to do that work is equally important.” Mathews grew up in New York, the daughter of a doctor and a writer — famed historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman was her mother — and her childhood dream was to ride horses in the Olympics. She was good enough to get an Olympic tryout but decided she had to choose between riding and her career goal of becoming a scientist.

After earning her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe College, she went to the California Institute of Technology — against her mother’s advice.

“She had no advanced degrees and looked down on them, in fact,” Mathews said. “When I went to graduate school, she said, ‘What do you want to do that for? Why don’t you just go do it?’ And I said, ‘Mom, you can’t do science unless you have a Ph.D.’ ”

During her last year of graduate school, though, she started thinking, “I really don’t belong in labs the rest of my life.”

Instead, she used her science background to develop an expertise in nuclear nonproliferation and environmental issues, and she eventually took her work and her policy ideas to government, to the media and then to the think tank world.

And while she still dreams of having more time to work in her garden at her home in the Virginia countryside and to ride her horse, a Dutch warmblood named Wicked Good, she has no regrets.

“I just followed my gut,” she said. “This is clearly where I belong.”

BIO FILE

Born: July 4, 1946 Hometown: New York, N.Y.

Education: Radcliffe College, 1963-1967, A.B., magna cum laude; California Institute of Technology, 1968-1973, doctorate in biochemistry and biophysics

Family: Husband, retired Air Force Gen. Charles Boyd; two sons, Oliver, 26, Jordan, 22

Key jobs: Director, National Security Council’s Office of Global Issues, 1977-1979; editorial board, Washington Post, 1980-1982; founding vice president and director of research, World Resources Institute, 1982-1993; senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, 1993-1997; president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1997-present

Biggest influence: Mother, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Barbara Tuchman. “Her clarity of thinking and her willingness to question things made her the shaper of my life.”

Favorite book: “Impossible question. Barbara Tuchman’s ‘Practicing History’ leaps to mind as one I’ve especially enjoyed rereading.”

Quote to live by: “Know the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.” – Margot Fonteyn

JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS’ TIPS FOR SUCCESS

1 – Never give less than your best; you never know who’s listening.

2 – Nothing pays off more than learning to write really well.

3 – Give praise (generously) in writing; give criticism face to face.

4 – Set the vision, find the best people, get the resources, then delegate, delegate, delegate.

5 – Have at least one thing in your life that gives you joy.

READ OTHER POWER PROFILES IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER