Insights from 50 years of secret Oval Office recordings

Kent Germany is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and nonresident faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center, where he works with the Presidential Recordings Program. He received his BA and MA from Louisiana Tech University and his PhD in history from Tulane University. Germany is the author of New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Georgia), a grassroots study of the civil rights and antipoverty movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their role in the transformation of race relations and political culture in New Orleans.

Bob Woodward has called Ken Hughes “one of America's foremost experts on secret presidential recordings, especially those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.” Hughes has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes and unearthing their secrets. As a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, and, since 2000, as a researcher with the Miller Center, Hughes’ work has illuminated the uses and abuses of presidential power involved in (among other things) the origins of Watergate, Jimmy Hoffa’s release from federal prison, and the politics of the Vietnam War.

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.

Guian McKee is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center. He received a PhD in American history at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2002, and is the author of Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (University of Chicago Press, 2008). At the Miller Center, McKee co-directs the Health Care Policy Project and serves as co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program. His research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities.