'Reconcilable Differences': John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt

Myra Gutin is professor emerita of communication at Rider University and author of The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century and Barbara Bush: First Lady of Literacy. She is one of the founding members and was the inaugural president of FLARE, the First Ladies Association for Research and Education. Gutin has authored numerous articles, book chapters and essays on the topics of American first ladies, women in politics, and political communication. In 2001 and 2009 she contributed articles to Report to the First Lady, a study of the history and office of the First Lady, presented to Laura Bush and Michelle Obama. A frequent media commentator, she also served as a special consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling first ladies exhibit during its sojourn at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. She holds a BA and MA in communications from Emerson College and a PhD in communications from the University of Michigan.

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center, where she co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program. She has authored or edited 17 books on presidents, First Ladies, the Kennedy family, the Supreme Court, and civil rights and civil liberties. Perry has conducted more than 150 interviews for the George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama Presidential Oral History Projects; interviewed President Bill Clinton; and directed the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project's conclusion. She served as a U.S. Supreme Court fellow and has worked for both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate. Perry earned a BA in political science from the University of Louisville, an MA in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford University, and a PhD in government from the University of Virginia.

Marc Selverstone is the Miller Center's Gerald L. Baliles Professor of Presidential Studies, the Center's director of presidential studies, and co-chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. He earned a BA in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard) and 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. As chair of the 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.