Experts

Marc Selverstone

Fast Facts

  • Director of presidential studies
  • Co-chair, Presidential Recordings Program
  • Won the Bernath Book Prize for Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950.
  • Expertise on John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War

 

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • American Defense and Security
  • Politics
  • The Presidency

Marc Selverstone is the Gerald L. Baliles Professor of Presidential Studies at the Miller Center, the Center's director of presidential studies, and co-chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. He earned a BA degree in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. 

A historian of the Cold War, Selverstone is the author of 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. His most recent book is The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard University Press).

As co-chair of the Presidential 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.

Selverstone’s broader scholarship focuses on presidents and presidential decision-making, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. He has written for journals and edited volumes on the Kennedy presidency, the Cold War, and the American war in Vietnam. He also co-edits the Miller Center’s “Studies on the Presidency” series (Virginia) with Miller Center Professor Guian McKee, and is the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell). 

 

Marc Selverstone News Feed

It is one of the great “what ifs” of American history—what if President John F. Kennedy had lived and what would have been his policy regarding troop deployments in Vietnam? On this week’s “Leaders and Legends” podcast acclaimed historian Marc Selverstone, Ph.D., discusses this topic and his superb book “The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam.” Would JFK have taken the same route of escalation as his successor Lyndon Johnson? Our discussion sheds some light on this question and others.
Marc Selverstone Leaders and Legends
The lessons of LBJ’s victory are clear
Marc Selverstone TIME
"The constellation of forces was more complex in the Johnson situation in 1968 than it is with Biden."
Marc Selverstone BBC News Brasil
“Movies have helped to shape the narrative for so many around the Vietnam War, particularly for generations far removed from it,” Selverstone said. “And I think the farther that we get away from it, the more impactful these kinds of sources may come to be. They were also pretty powerful when I was watching them when they first came out.”
Marc Selverstone UVA Today
It is the most irresistible “what if?” in modern history. What would President John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he not been assassinated in November 1963? It is the greatest testament to Marc Selverstone’s great book that he simultaneously provides the most authoritative answer yet to the Kennedy counterfactual while largely resisting its siren song.
Marc Selverstone The Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combined to spark the drama of a lifetime. Frederick "Fritz" Nolting, the U.S. ambassador, and his second-in-command, William "Bill" Trueheart, were immortalized in David Halberstam's landmark 1972 work, The Best and the Brightest, as accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern U.S. history. A new book in the Miller Center Studies on the Presidency series with UVA Press, Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting's godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation.
Marc Selverstone Miller Center Presents