At the Miller Center, presidential transition scholar and centenarian Laurin Henry, 102, is regarded as a venerated ancestor. Measured according to the Miller Center’s unit of currency—presidential terms—Henry’s remarkable lifetime spans Republican Warren Harding to Democrat Joseph Biden.

Before Henry, no one had produced a comprehensive study of why some presidential transitions were successful and why others failed. He analyzed the strained Truman-Eisenhower turnover of 1952-53 as part of an informal project at the Public Administration Clearing House. When he joined the Brookings Institution in the late 1950s, he expanded his study from an analysis of the most recent presidential transition into a thorough investigation of patterns from the past to help improve transitions moving forward.

In his seminal 1960 study, Presidential Transitions, Henry demonstrated that the peaceful transfer of power—a central tenet of American democracy—had often boiled down to all parties agreeing to abide by the concept. Most American presidents have, even if sometimes grudgingly, allowed a rational approach focused on logistics to triumph over partisan politics.

Until the transition from Donald Trump to Biden in 2020-21, the closest most Americans had ever experienced to a truly disruptive presidential handoff was in 2000-2001, when the outcome in Florida remained uncertain for more than a month until the Supreme Court ruled that the counting should end. Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results went beyond that, as he denied the election's outcome, refused to cooperate with the Biden transition team, and tried to overturn the election results. The violence on January 6, 2021, revealed that a peaceful transfer of power between presidents is not foreordained.

Henry’s research traced numerous detrimental effects of unprepared presidents-elect. He focused on four presidential transitions in the 20th century in which the incumbent party had been overturned, considering that cross-party transitions would highlight potential problems in sharpest relief. He wrote about lessons from the transitions of Taft to Wilson (1912-13), Wilson to Harding (1920-21), Hoover to Roosevelt (1932-33), and Truman to Eisenhower (1952-53), with the last example serving, generally, as a model to avoid.

A longtime Miller Center supporter, Henry helped shape the Center. He left Brookings to join the University of Virginia faculty in 1964 as a professor of government and foreign affairs. A few years later, Henry was asked to draft the initial proposal for a “Center of Public Affairs.” After some revision and several years, Burkett Miller agreed to the plan, and the Miller Center officially came into existence on September 1, 1975. Henry was also present at the creation of the Center's Presidential Oral History Program—he participated in a day-long symposium on Gerald Ford's presidency in April 1977, which became the Center's first presidential oral history. Around the 10th anniversary of the Miller Center in 1985, he delivered a public lecture in the Forum Room on presidential transitions.

Speaking in his apartment in Charlottesville—by happy chance very close to the Miller Center—Henry noted that the presidential transition period has always been called, justifiably, a “problem,” but one that can be navigated successfully when government officials are guided by history and best practices.

Perhaps because of its practical nature, Presidential Transitions was among the weekend reading materials that traveled with John F. Kennedy to Palm Beach, Florida, in late November 1960, two weeks after he was elected president. Unfortunately, as Henry wrote in an unpublished memoir, this was the same weekend when “Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth prematurely to John F. Kennedy Jr. The president-elect rushed back to Georgetown and all about him was disrupted for a few days, so whether he ever read or even saw the book, I cannot say.”

“I did get a little satisfaction later,” Henry continued, “when it was included in the select library assembled at the White House for Jacqueline Kennedy by a committee of distinguished librarians and historians.”

A number of the book’s recommendations were fully realized in public policy, along with Henry’s later suggestions to offer publicly funded support of transition teams. The Presidential Transition Act of 1963 is still the basis for modern presidential transitions, with protocols for an orderly transition and provisions for funding a new administration’s transition team.

“The prospect of getting all the Act’s benefits has definitely encouraged presidential candidates to begin thinking about the transition during the campaign and have at least the rudiments of a transition operation in place by Election Day,” Henry noted.

"I feel so honored to have a career that moved forward in the wake of Laurin's truly original professional voyage," said Miller Center Director and CEO William Antholis. "I've been lucky to work on transition projects at Brookings and the Miller Center, as well as our oral history interview teams. None of those opportunities would have been available to me, or any of us, had it not been for Laurin."

Over the course of his long lifetime, Henry has counseled the Center to continue its nonpartisan work and continues to encourage young people to “find a way to participate in public service.” He offers timeless advice to all citizens, suggesting that “each of us try to develop a worldview of being sufficiently grounded in the details of our democracy so that we’re not prone to overly simplistic generalizations about complex processes.”