Marc Selverstone

Dove will then continue her work with Associate Professor Marc Selverstone of U.Va.’s Miller Center over the subsequent year to develop curricular materials based upon the event, under the heading “New Approaches to Teaching Democracy.” These materials will be presented at a U.Va. event hosted by the Center for the Liberal Arts in the spring of 2022, and completed in the summer of 2022. The goal of this program is to take the content produced at the U.Va. Democracy Biennial and develop resources for middle and high school teachers.

Marc Selverstone, associate professor of presidential studies and chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, then led a Q&A session with Zelikow, asking how the U.S. military should continue to act in foreign countries.

On the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the 2021 Ambassador William C. Battle Symposium explores its impact on the United States at home and in the world. Drawing on expertise from scholars, practitioners, and journalists, this conference examines the history of this era with an eye toward its implications for the future.

On the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the 2021 Ambassador William C. Battle Symposium explores its impact on the United States at home and in the world. Drawing on expertise from scholars, practitioners, and journalists, this conference examines the history of this era with an eye toward its implications for the future.

In December 1968, only weeks after his election, Nixon names Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor. The appointment will prove to be the most consequential of his presidency. The two men barely know each other, but Kissinger moves swiftly and brilliantly to make himself the linchpin – some would say the architect – of Nixon’s enormously ambitious foreign policy agenda. Immediately, and with the new president’s blessing, Kissinger marginalizes both State and Defense, concentrating the making of US foreign policy within the White House. The first challenge: how to force the implacable North Vietnamese leadership back to the negotiating table. By late January ’69, a plan is in place: Operation Menu, a massive and completely secret bombing assault, not on Vietnam but on North Vietnamese army sanctuaries in neighboring (and neutral) Cambodia. Over the next eight years, the U.S. will drop more bomb tonnage on Cambodia than the combined Allied forces dropped in all of World War II. While the bombing remains largely a secret in the U.S., it fails to move the needle on negotiations with the North. By the fall of ’69, the lack of progress has re-energized the anti-war movement, which mobilizes a wave of demonstrations across the country. In response, Nixon takes his case to the country, with the Silent Majority speech, which will come to be remembered as perhaps the most effective address of his presidency.

Fredrik Logevall, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this revealing biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, 35th president. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956 offers up not only the clearest portrait we have of this enigmatic American icon but a sweeping history of the United States in the middle decades of the 20th century as well. Miller Center Director of Presidential Studies Barbara Perry and professor Marc Selverstone moderate the conversation.