Biography | Chuck Robbins — The Eisenhower Award Dinner in This Reagan Building Atrium

By April 2018 he had been Cisco's chief executive for less than three years and its board chair for four months.

The public pin that night was not Tasman Drive.

Business Executives for National Security held its Eisenhower Award dinner in the atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

DoD caption files locate the evening in that building on 5 April 2018.

The award went jointly to Robbins and to Gen. Paul J. Selva, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for work the organizers described as advancing national security through innovation and reform.

Michael Leiter moderated the onstage conversation.

U.S. Army Sgt. James K. McCann made the photographs that still sit on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY 2.0 tag from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff account.

Those frames are the clearest public pictures of Robbins from the period: dark suit, open discussion, no product launch backdrop.

The Reagan Building opened in 1998 as the last large structure on the Federal Triangle.

BENS has used it for later Eisenhower dinners as well.

The 2018 night is the one that put the Cisco chair on a Washington stage with the uniformed deputy of the Joint Chiefs and left a government photographer's record behind.

Photo: U.S. Army Sgt. James K. McCann, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons