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

“He was basically Nixon’s bagman,” says Ken Hughes, a research specialist at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. “He got money where Nixon wanted money spent. He was the source of the money for the slush fund that paid for sabotage and spying activities on the Democratic presidential candidates in 1972.”
Ken Hughes History.com
Ken Hughes is a historian of the presidency (specializing in secret White House recordings) at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. As Nancy Pelosi gaveled in the House of Representatives on Thursday, I asked him what we might expect from Congress in 2019, what lessons we might learn from previous government shut downs, Donald Trump’s idiosyncratic views in defense of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and what we should remember from the beginning of Richard Nixon’s administration, 50 years ago this month. That time period was covered in Hughes’ 2014 book, Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate. We talked by telephone on Thursday.
Ken Hughes The Score
For a White House that has frequently drawn parallels to the turmoil of the Watergate era, Cohen’s sentencing adds one more tick to the list. Herbert W. Kalmbach, President Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer, received a prison sentence on June 17, 1974, exactly two years after the Watergate break-in, for funneling hush money to Watergate defendants. “In Watergate, he’s the money, the bagman” says Ken Hughes, an expert on Watergate at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center.
Ken Hughes TIME
Miller Center expert Ken Hughes is featured in this new MSNBC documentary about Nixon and the "Chennault Affair"
Ken Hughes MSNBC
During the trial of Nixon's aides, the hush money and offer of pardons were treated as instances of obstruction of justice, according to Ken Hughes, a historian at the University of Virginia Miller Center who studies the White House tapes and Watergate. Hughes said that while it was public knowledge that the grand jury wanted to indict Nixon, the charges themselves were never made public.
Ken Hughes CNN
President Lyndon Johnson talked about halting the bombing of North Vietnam and its effect on the pending presidential election and his address to the nation. Ken Hughes provided an insight into the war.
Ken Hughes C-SPAN