'How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Top Presidents'

Talmage Boston is an attorney, historian, author, and speaker. His latest book is How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons From Our Top Presidents. He also wrote Cross-Examining History (foreword by Ken Burns), Raising the Bar (foreword by former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh), Baseball and the Baby Boomer (foreword by Frank Deford), and 1939: Baseball’s Tipping Point (foreword by John Grisham). A partner at Shackelford, McKinley & Norton, LLP, in Dallas, Texas, Boston has been named a “Texas Super Lawyer” by Thompson Reuters every year since 2003 and among the “Best Lawyers in America” every year since 2013. Boston holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and a JD from the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Steven Gillon is a nonresident senior fellow at the Miller Center, the former scholar-in-residence at the History Channel, and emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. He is one of the nation's leading experts on modern American history and politics. Gillon received his BA in history from Widener University. He went on to earn his MA and PhD in American civilization from Brown University. He taught history for nine years at Yale University, where he won the prestigious DeVane Medal for outstanding undergraduate teaching. He then taught modern history at Oxford University for three years before returning to the United States at the invitation of the president of the University of Oklahoma to become the founding dean of a new honors college. Gillon has written or edited nearly a dozen books, including Presidents at War, which will be released in early 2025.

Marc Selverstone is the Miller Center's Gerald L. Baliles Professor of Presidential Studies, co-chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, and a professor of presidential studies. He earned a BA in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard) and Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. As chair of the Recordings Program, Selverstone edits the Secret White House Tapes of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. He is the general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition, the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes, published by the University of Virginia Press.