Experts

Ken Hughes

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. 

 

Ken Hughes News Feed

Ken Hughes, a historian and Watergate expert at the University of Virginia's Miller Center spoke to Insider this week, offering a nuanced analysis of two primetime presentations separated by five decades.
Ken Hughes Business Insider
"Neither set of hearings, however, convinced the Republican base,” says Ken Hughes, a Watergate expert at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center.
Ken Hughes Time
President Nixon would play China against the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union against China, and both against North Vietnam.
Ken Hughes
This week, Research Specialist for the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Ken Hughes joins Abby in the classroom to explain the Watergate scandal. Ken reflects on how the Watergate scandal altered the government and public understanding of the parameters of Presidential power, as well as how it impacted the remainder of the Nixon Administration. Later, Ken reveals to Abby some of the unknown key players in the Watergate break-in.
Ken Hughes Getting Schooled Podcast
Ken Hughes is interviewed about Watergate.
Ken Hughes Tagesschau (Germany)
Ken Hughes, a researcher with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, was 8 years old in 1972. He began studying Watergate seriously in the 1990s, and said, “I’m still learning new things about it.” After studying the scandal for decades, and listening to the hundreds of hours of scratchy-sounding tapes Nixon recorded in the Oval Office, Hughes said Watergate was more complex, and simpler, than most people realize, and still echoes today. “A lot of people assume that Nixon authorized the Watergate cover-up because he was involved in the Watergate break-in,” Hughes said. “I still haven’t seen any good evidence that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in before it took place.”
Ken Hughes WTOP