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

Way back in May – when many Americans didn’t know where Ukraine was, let alone the name of its president – presidential scholar Ken Hughes at the University of Virginia wrote about a congressional committee that had voted to impeach the president for defying congressional subpoenas.
Ken Hughes The National Interest
“In 1974, Republicans called the impeachment inquiry a witch hunt, a kangaroo court, and a lynch mob,” said Ken Hughes, a historian with the University of Virginia’s nonpartisan Miller Center. “In terms of political rhetoric, 2019 is like a photocopy of 1974.”
Ken Hughes The Hill
Ken Hughes, an expert on Watergate with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, has spent time recently reviewing decades-old remarks from members of the 1974 committee. History, as it often does, has repeated itself, Hughes noted in a recent interview with Courthouse News. “It’s amazing how much political rhetoric of 2019 echoes that of 1974,” he said. “Republicans in 1974 called the impeachment inquiry a witch hunt and a kangaroo court. They complained their witnesses were not being called, that hearings were held in closed doors in executive session and that the president was the victim of selective leaks. That much hasn’t changed.”
Ken Hughes Courthouse News Service
HuffPost spoke with researcher Ken Hughes about what comes next in the impeachment saga currently unfolding on Capitol Hill.
Ken Hughes HuffPost
Nixon press secretary Ronald Ziegler called the Watergate break-in a "third-rate burglary attempt"; Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham dismissed the Ukraine scandal with the phrase "third-hand accounts". What are the similarities and differences between the two scandals? Our Ken Hughes weighs in.
Nixon was hardly above using foreign policy to distract the public from impeachment and try to burnish his leadership: As Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Henry Kissinger, Nixon was “obsessed” with ending the Arab oil embargo, “a coup he thought might bring some relief from Watergate.” Even when the president gave vent to his worst impulses, he was restrained or deflected not just by his seasoned secretary of state, but also by a formidable Cold War-era policy-making machinery and bureaucracy. Although Watergate distracted Nixon from his presidential duties, historian Ken Hughes of the Miller Center told me via e-mail, “It never came close to crippling the functioning of the federal government.”
Ken Hughes Blooomberg Opinion