Revisiting the Ronald Reagan presidency

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for The Washington Post. His bestselling new book, Reagan: His Life and Legend, was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times, which described it as a "landmark work." Boot is the author of four other books, including The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, which has been placed on military professional reading lists. Boot has been a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, among other outlets. He has been a CNN global affairs analyst and a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and others. He served as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. He holds a BA in history from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in history from Yale University.

Chester Pach is a professor of history at Ohio University. He is the author or editor of Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945-1950; The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower; A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower; and The Johnson Years. He is completing The Presidency of Ronald Reagan for submission to the University Press of Kansas and is the author of “The Long Goodbye: Mourning and Remembering Ronald Reagan,” in Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2023). He has written extensively on U.S. television news coverage of the Vietnam War, and his most recent publication is “The U.S. News Media and Vietnam” in The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, vol. II (2025). He is also the editor of the Miller Center’s U.S. Presidents page on Dwight D. Eisenhower. Pach holds an AB from Brown University and a PhD from Northwestern University.

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center, where she codirects the Presidential Oral History Program. She has authored or edited 17 books on presidents, First Ladies, the Kennedy family, the Supreme Court, and civil rights and civil liberties. Perry has conducted more than 150 interviews for the George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama Presidential Oral History Projects; interviewed President Bill Clinton; and directed the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project's conclusion. She served as a U.S. Supreme Court fellow and has worked for both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate. Perry earned a BA in political science from the University of Louisville, an MA in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford University, and a PhD in government from the University of Virginia.