Week Nine — August 19–25, 2012

The Presidents' Club

With the U.S. presidency a singular position that only those who have occupied the White House can understand, relationships between current and former presidents cross political boundaries. How do they relate to each other? Where are the boundaries? What role do families play in the presidency? In a week that takes its title from a new book by Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, we’ll examine historic relationships between the president and former presidents and their families.

Confirmed Lecturers

Monday 8/20	Tuesday 8/21	Wednesday 8/22	Thursday 8/23	Friday 8/24
Nancy Gibbs	Timothy J. Naftali	Susan Ford Bales Lynda Johnson Robb	Richard Norton Smith	Nancy Gibbs Michael Duffy

Monday, August 20 and Friday, August 24

Nancy Gibbs

deputy managing editor, Time; co-author, The Presidents Club

Nancy Gibbs is deputy managing editor of Time and co-author with Michael Duffy of The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity. Named by the Chicago Tribune as one of the 10 best magazine writers in the country, she is the author of more than 150 Time cover stories and many back-page essays.

Gibbs’ story for the black-bordered special issue on Sept. 11, 2001, won the National Magazine Award. She was the lead Time writer on virtually every major news event from Oklahoma City to Hurricane Katrina, as well as the last five presidential campaigns; after the 2008 election, Politico described her as “the poet laureate of presidents.” Gibbs and Duffy also co-authored the New York Times best-seller The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.

A frequent commentator on radio and television and former essayist on the “PBS NewsHour,” Gibbs has twice served as the Ferris Professor at Princeton, where she taught a seminar on “Politics and the Press.” She graduated from Yale and has a degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford, where she was a Marshall scholar. Gibbs, a lifelong Chautauquan, has appeared several times on the morning lecture platform.

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Tuesday, August 21

Timothy J. Naftali

former director, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Timothy Naftali is a senior research fellow in the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation. In his prior position, having joined the National Archives in October 2006, he became the first director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif. The Nixon Library’s Watergate exhibit, for which Naftali was historian and curator, opened in March 2011. He left the library in November 2011 to write a study of the Kennedy presidency for publication in 2013.

Previously, Naftali ran the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. During this period, he also served as a consultant to the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group and the 9/11 Commission. He is the author or co-author of four books, including “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964; Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism; and George H. W. Bush.

Naftali has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, the History Channel and C-SPAN and has written for The New York Times, Slate, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal and blogged for the Huffington Post. He has a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a doctorate in history from Harvard.

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Wednesday, August 22

Susan Ford Bales

former chairman, Betty Ford Center

Lynda Johnson Robb

board member, LBJ Foundation

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Thursday, August 23

Richard Norton Smith

presidential historian; scholar in residence, George Mason University

Richard Norton Smith, now a scholar in residence at George Mason University, has created or directed presidential libraries dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. A regular contributor to C-SPAN and the “PBS NewsHour,” he is creator of “The Contenders,” a C-SPAN series about presidential candidates who ran and lost, but changed history.

Smith’s first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. His other books include An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation and The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, described by Hilton Kramer as “the best book ever written about the press.” He has also collaborated with Bob and Elizabeth Dole on their joint autobiography, Unlimited Partners.

Smith was the first permanent director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. He previously served on the staffs of Sen. Dole and Sen. Edward Brooke, as a White House intern and as a freelance writer for The Washington Post. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in government.

In the news:

• Smith interviewed on "PBS NewsHour": "How Abraham Lincoln Shaped American Politics, Popular Culture"
• Smith interviewed at Politico on State of the Union speeches: "What's in a speech?"

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Friday, August 24

Michael Duffy

assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief, Time; co-author, The Presidents Club

Michael Duffy is assistant managing editor and the Washington bureau chief of Time and co-author with Nancy Gibbs of The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity. Duffy joined Time in 1985 as a Pentagon correspondent and in the 25 years since has covered Congress, the White House, national politics and national security.

Duffy, who has written more than 50 Time cover stories, has won the Gerald R. Ford Award for reporting both on the White House and on defense and national security. He shared, with a team from Time, in the Joan Shorenstein Barone Prize for Investigative Journalism awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School in 1997. Duffy and Gibbs also co-authored the New York Times best-seller The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.

Duffy has been a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and has appeared regularly on PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” for the past 15 years. Prior to joining Time, he was a staff writer at Defense Week. He is a graduate of Oberlin College.

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