Celebrating the LBJ telephone tapes

Melody Barnes is co-director for policy and public affairs for the Democracy Initiative, an interdisciplinary teaching, research, and engagement effort led by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is also a professor of practice at the Miller Center and distinguished fellow at the UVA School of Law. During the administration of President Barack Obama, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She was also executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Michael Beschloss is an award-winning historian and the best-selling author of numerous books. Newsweek has called Beschloss “the nation’s leading presidential historian.” He is the NBC News Presidential Historian, the first time any major network has created such a position, and appears regularly on Meet the Press, Today, and all NBC network programs. He is a regular commentator on PBS NewsHour. In 2005, he won an Emmy for his role in creating the Discovery Channel series Decisions that Shook the World, of which he was the host. His latest book is Presidents of War.

Brian Williams is the anchor of The 11th Hour with Brian Williams on MSNBC. Over the course of his career, Williams has received over a dozen Emmy Awards, eleven Edward R. Murrow Awards, four DuPont-Columbia University Awards, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the industry’s highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award. Williams served as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” for a decade, during which it was the most-watched newscast in the United States. Williams is also a former chief White House correspondent for NBC News. In 2007, TIME named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Mark Atwood Lawrence is director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Until January 2020, he taught as associate professor of History at UT-Austin, where his classes focused on American and international history. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, which won the Paul Birdsall Prize for European military and strategic history and the George Louis Beer Prize for European international history. In 2008, he published The Vietnam War:  A Concise International History, which was selected by the History Book Club and the Military History Book Club. His new book, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, will be published by Princeton University Press in fall 2021.