Experts

Ken Hughes

Fast Facts

  • Bob Woodward called Hughes "one of America's foremost experts on secret presidential recordings"
  • Has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes
  • Expertise on Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Secret White House Tapes, abuses of presidential power, Watergate, Vietnam War

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • American Defense and Security
  • Governance
  • Leadership
  • Political Parties and Movements
  • Politics
  • The Presidency

Bob Woodward has called Ken Hughes “one of America's foremost experts on secret presidential recordings, especially those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.” Hughes has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes and unearthing their secrets. As a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, and, since 2000, as a researcher with the Miller Center, Hughes’s work has illuminated the uses and abuses of presidential power involved in (among other things) the origins of Watergate, Jimmy Hoffa’s release from federal prison, and the politics of the Vietnam War. 

Hughes has been interviewed by the New York Times, CBS News, CNN, PBS NewsHour, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and other news organizations. He is the author of Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate and Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War and the Casualties of Reelection.

Hughes is currently at work on a book about President John F. Kennedy’s hidden role in the coup plot that resulted in the overthrow and assassination of another president, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. 

 

Ken Hughes News Feed

Kenneth Hughes Jr., a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who is considered one of the foremost experts on the audiotapes from Nixon’s White House, said the recordings clearly demonstrate that Nixon was “the ring leader of the abuses of power that we group under the heading of Watergate.”
Ken Hughes NBC News
Kennedy Jr. omitted the most important part of the “Operation Northwoods” story: his father’s role. I learned of that role from documents declassified by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, in the Kennedy Library and in other archives while researching a book I’m writing, “Clandestine Camelot.”
Ken Hughes The Conversation
“Kissinger” is more recap than reveal. It repeats, without shedding new light, on the ways Kissinger has long been celebrated and castigated. Defenders say he did great things for American foreign policy, critics say he did terrible things to other countries and neither pay much attention to the terrible things he did to America.
Ken Hughes Salon
At least one of Ford’s would-be assassins came from the radical left. But Ford refused, in the words of the University of Virginia historian Ken Hughes, to “play up the drama or the danger” of the attacks against him.
Ken Hughes The New York Times
Perhaps the closest parallel to Friday’s firing happened in 1971, after the BLS reported that unemployment that June had dropped from 6.2% to 5.6% – good news for President Richard Nixon, who faced reelection the next year. When he read the following day that the bureau warned the drop might be “a statistical quirk,” he quietly reassigned the assistant BLS commissioner who had made the “quirk” comment, according to an account by Kenneth Hughes.
Ken Hughes The Christian Science Monitor
In the years since, the extent of the U.S. role in the Diem coup and assassination has been hotly debated and disputed.
Ken Hughes National Security Archive