Experts in the News | Miller Center

Teaching Watergate: What do we learn and how do we learn it?

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

The history and drama of the U.S. Supreme Court

It's no surprise for an institution imbued with such power, but the Supreme Court of the United States has been a figure of much controversy over its long history. Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Rod Quinn interviews University of Virginia Miller Center's Barbara A. Perry, presidency and U.S. Supreme court expert, about everything from impeachments to the Constitution.

Barbara Perry

Watergate 50 years later: Last guy to turn out the lights before burglars arrived recalls infamous break-in

However, when Wills returned to the building, he noticed a piece of tape covering the latch of a door during his rounds. "At first, he thought it was something that the cleaning crew had done," said Ken Hughes, a research specialist at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and author of "Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate." "And so, he took it off. And when he came back later, he found that they had retaped it, so it was kind of a ... bungle."

Ken Hughes

France’s Fine Line for Achieving Peace in Ukraine

Macron has tried to play mediator before—in Lebanon, in Iraq, and in Libya—with limited success. Eric Edelman, former U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey and former under secretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense, pointed out that France has a long history of acting as an independent actor between world powers, dating back to President Charles de Gaulle. “I think there is some virtue in keeping lines open with Putin, but I think Macron has overdone it,” Edelman told The Dispatch. “The constant calls from him, and from [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz, are interpreted by Putin, in my view, as weakness, indicating that the West can be brought around to sue for peace.”

Eric Edelman

Watergate anniversary puts spotlight on Miller Center's White House tape collection

Here’s what University of Virginia researcher Ken Hughes wants you to know about the Miller Center’s collection of President Nixon’s secret recordings: “It is vast,” he said. “What we think of as the Watergate tapes were just 12 and a half hours. There are more than 2,500 hours of Nixon tapes available to the public today. And while the 12 and a half hours contain some of his worst crimes, he actually did worse things than Watergate.” Hughes is a presidential historian and Watergate scholar, dubbed by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward as “one of America’s foremost experts on secret presidential recordings.”

Ken Hughes

John Hinckley, Jr. freed from court oversight after decades

“For the president himself to have been so seriously wounded, and to come back from that—that actually made Ronald Reagan the legend that he became . . . like the movie hero that he was,” said Barbara Perry, Gerald L. Baliles Professor and Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

Barbara Perry