Marc Selverstone

On the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the 2021 Ambassador William C. Battle Symposium explores its impact on the United States at home and in the world. Drawing on expertise from scholars, practitioners, and journalists, this conference examines the history of this era with an eye toward its implications for the future.

In December 1968, only weeks after his election, Nixon names Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor. The appointment will prove to be the most consequential of his presidency. The two men barely know each other, but Kissinger moves swiftly and brilliantly to make himself the linchpin – some would say the architect – of Nixon’s enormously ambitious foreign policy agenda. Immediately, and with the new president’s blessing, Kissinger marginalizes both State and Defense, concentrating the making of US foreign policy within the White House. The first challenge: how to force the implacable North Vietnamese leadership back to the negotiating table. By late January ’69, a plan is in place: Operation Menu, a massive and completely secret bombing assault, not on Vietnam but on North Vietnamese army sanctuaries in neighboring (and neutral) Cambodia. Over the next eight years, the U.S. will drop more bomb tonnage on Cambodia than the combined Allied forces dropped in all of World War II. While the bombing remains largely a secret in the U.S., it fails to move the needle on negotiations with the North. By the fall of ’69, the lack of progress has re-energized the anti-war movement, which mobilizes a wave of demonstrations across the country. In response, Nixon takes his case to the country, with the Silent Majority speech, which will come to be remembered as perhaps the most effective address of his presidency.

Fredrik Logevall, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this revealing biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, 35th president. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956 offers up not only the clearest portrait we have of this enigmatic American icon but a sweeping history of the United States in the middle decades of the 20th century as well. Miller Center Director of Presidential Studies Barbara Perry and professor Marc Selverstone moderate the conversation.

Our country is deeply divided. We’ll remain so for some time. The Biden administration will move quickly to get things done. It only has a year to do so, before the mid-term elections move into high gear.
We’ll continue to reel from assaults on both truth and an array of institutions vital to the maintenance of a healthy democracy. Those are not novel concepts. But they — and others, much more in depth and nuanced — have particular resonance, on this inauguration day. They come from Marc Selverstone. The 1980 Staples High School graduate is an associate professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s famed Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Marc Selverstone, a professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, confirmed to Newsweek that former presidents do continue to receive briefings after holding office, but it is usually upon their request. Selverstone added that "the privilege also comes at the discretion of the sitting president," although he noted that no modern president has countermanded that privilege.

Presidential transitions are among the most sacred, yet precarious moments in the American political lifecycle. The peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another has been a core principle of American democracy for well over 200 years. But transitions are also moments of inherent instability, with one set of officials heading for the exits and another one hitting the on-ramps. While outgoing and incoming administrations have long endeavored to effect smooth handovers, any number of developments, from the personal to the political to the geopolitical, can make it a perilous process.