Experts

Ken Hughes

Research Specialist
Ken Hughes CV.pdf

Fast Facts

  • Bob Woodward called Hughes "one of America's foremost experts on secret presidential recordings"
  • Has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes
  • Expertise on Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Secret White House Tapes, abuses of presidential power, Watergate, Vietnam War

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • American Defense and Security
  • Governance
  • Leadership
  • Political Parties and Movements
  • Politics
  • The Presidency

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’s 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. 

Hughes has been interviewed by the New York Times, CBS News, CNN, PBS NewsHour, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and other news organizations. He is the author of Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate and Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War and the Casualties of Reelection.

Hughes is currently at work on a book about President John F. Kennedy’s hidden role in the coup plot that resulted in the overthrow and assassination of another president, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. 

 

Featured Publications

Fatal Politics
Fatal Politics

Ken Hughes

Chasing Shadows
Chasing Shadows

Ken Hughes

Ken Hughes News Feed

CNN
Trump plans to release classified JFK documents
Ken Hughes, a presidential researcher at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, told CNN the files could shed light on the US involvement in the attempts to assassinate Castro as well as the US-approved coup of South Vietnamese leader Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963. "There's a lot for conventional historians -- we non-conspiracy theorists -- to look forward to," he said.
Ken Hughes CNN
UVA Today
Miller Center experts aid PBS production of 'The Vietnam War'
With its sweeping look at one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, the PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” captivated viewers around the country when it debuted in late September. The epic 18-hour documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick takes a deep dive into the conflict with perspectives and reflections from people on all sides of the war. Experts at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center worked as consultants on the project to ensure that those perspectives included the private musings of three American presidents.
Marc Selverstone and Ken Hughes UVA Today
Salon
Nixon, Vietnam and the politics of polarization
Nixon was a master of the dark art of orchestrating political tensions, resentments and animosities for maximum political gain. The divisions he sowed in America have never entirely healed.
Ken Hughes Salon
CSPAN
The LBJ Tapes: Gulf of Tonkin
President Lyndon Johnson talked about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, sending ground troops to Vietnam and Congressional hearings on the war. Participants included Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. President Johnson also confered with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman and longtime adviser Richard Russell. Historian Ken Hughes from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who was a consultant for "The Vietnam War," is interviewed.
Ken Hughes C-SPAN Radio
Salon
“This is treason”: Nixon, Vietnam and the “sordid story” of the Chennault Affair
The Republican nominee colluded with a foreign government to win the presidential election. The nominee was Richard Nixon, the foreign government was South Vietnam, and the election was 1968. This “sordid story,” as then-President Lyndon B. Johnson described it to Nixon (in a telephone conversation LBJ secretly tape-recorded), is one of the many narrative threads masterfully woven by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick into episode seven of "The Vietnam War," titled “The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968–May 1969).”
Ken Hughes Salon
POLITICO
When a Candidate Conspired With a Foreign Power to Win An Election
Journalists Drew Pearson, Tom Ottenad, Theodore White, Jules Witcover and Seymour Hersh advanced the story, bit by bit, over the years. So did book-writing Johnson administration officials like Clark Clifford and William Bundy and University of Virginia scholar Ken Hughes, in a 2014 book, Chasing Shadows.
Ken Hughes POLITICO Magazine