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.

The University of Virginia Karsh Institute of Democracy will be holding a two-day event in September to talk about the future of democracy. The featured speakers are Melody Barnes of the Karsh Institute of Democracy; Julian Castor, the Housing and Urban Development Secretary in the Obama administration; John Dickerson of CBS News; Robert Dole of the American Enterprise Institute; Tom Perez, the Secretary of Labor in the Obama administration; former Congressman Denver Riggleman; Rashad Robinson of Color of Change; Stephanie Ruhle of NBC News/MSNBC; David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, and Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education in the George W. Bush administration.

Miller Center senior fellow Aynne Kokas is interviewed.

“The question for Garland is whether righting the ship of the department is mutually exclusive from moving on from Trump,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Senior Fellow Eric Edelman explains why the withdrawal from Afghanistan may be an important strategic mistake.

Mr. Biden has ordered an intelligence review, due this summer, but that’s hardly enough, and he should actively support the creation of an independent commission that would examine virus origins and the nation’s response to the crisis. Congress ought to join in. Many national and global calamities were later subject to bipartisan investigation: Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, the John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, 9/11. A great start already exists with the Covid Commission Planning Group led by Philip Zelikow, but it needs a sense that the White House, Congress and other national leaders will welcome the probe and assist with a full-blown independent investigation.