Events

Pressure cooker: Leadership lessons from the Secret White House Tapes

Handwritten note from Cuban Missile Crisis saying "we are demanding withdrawal of the missiles"

National Archives

Pressure cooker: Leadership lessons from the Secret White House Tapes

Marc Selverstone

Wednesday, April 29, 2020
11:00AM - 12:00PM (EDT)
Event Details

When presidents encounter crises, their leadership skills are tested under the most stressful of circumstances. But notes, memos, and other official documents often leave out the human dimension that has led our presidents to succeed or fail when the stakes are high. Using recordings from the Center's Secret White House Tapes, Marc Selverstone tells us stories of presidents under pressure and reveals the lessons that we might apply today.

When
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
11:00AM - 12:00PM (EDT)
Where
Speakers
Marc Selverstone headshot

Marc Selverstone

Marc Selverstone is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, where he edits the secret White House tapes of Presidents Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon. A historian of the Cold War, he 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 broader scholarship focuses on presidents and presidential decisionmaking, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s.