Running the White House

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for MSNBC, and author of Days of Fire and The Breach. Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of its weekly "Letter from Trump's Washington" as well as a CNN global affairs analyst. Their first assignment as a married couple was as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, after which they wrote Kremlin Rising. Today they live in Washington, D.C., with their son.

Eric Edelman, Anne C. Strickler Practitioner Senior Fellow at the Miller Center, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009, after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls.

Over the course of a 20-year career in public service, Chris Lu, the Miller Center's Teresa A. Sullivan Practitioner Senior Fellow, worked in all three branches of the federal government, including seven years in the Obama administration. From 2014–17, Lu was the deputy secretary of labor, having been confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. From 2009–13, Lu was the White House cabinet secretary and assistant to the president, serving as the president’s primary liaison to the federal agencies. At the end of the first term, Obama said: “Through his dedication and tireless efforts, Chris has overseen one of the most stable and effective cabinets in history—a cabinet that has produced extraordinary accomplishments over the past four years.”

David Marchick is a retired executive from the Carlyle Group serving in a volunteer role as director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service. He is also an adjunct professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth as a senior of counsel at the firm Covington & Burling. He also serves on a number of corporate and non-profit boards of directors. Marchick spent 12 years at the Carlyle Group and most recently served as managing director and global head of external affairs and as a member of Carlyle’s management committee. He led Carlyle’s regulatory and government affairs, communications and branding, and sustainability efforts. 

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas is a nonresident senior fellow with Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, senior research director for the White House Transition Project, a fellow with the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service, and secretary of the Governance Institute. Tenpas is a scholar of the American presidency focusing on White House staffing, presidential transitions, and the intersection of politics and policy within the presidency (e.g., presidential reelection campaigns, trends in presidential travel, and polling).

William Antholis serves as director and CEO of the Miller Center. Immediately prior, he was managing director at The Brookings Institution, and from 1995 to 1999 he served in government. At the White House, he was director of international economic affairs on the staff of the National Security Council and National Economic Council, where he served as the chief staff person for the G8 Summits in 1997 and 1998. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global and, with Strobe Talbot,Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming.

Mary Kate Cary, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, served as a White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, authoring more than 100 of his presidential addresses. She also has ghostwritten several books related to President Bush’s life and career and served as senior writer for communications for the 1988 Bush-Quayle presidential campaign.

Today, Cary is asked to write speeches, presentations, and reports for a variety of national political, corporate, and nonprofit leaders. Her assignments have included State of the Union responses, Republican National Convention addresses, and TED talks. She served as founding managing editor of the daily political news service The Hotline, as a staffer at ABC News’ This Week with David Brinkley, and as a columnist at U.S. News & World Report.