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

“What can it be like to work for Donald Trump?” University of Virginia Miller Center researcher Ken Hughes asked. “You have to let off steam.”
Ken Hughes Las Vegas Review-Journal
The out-in-the-open war of words showed “a level of bathos that you just don’t expect to ever see in the Oval Office,” researcher Ken Hughes of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center said.
Ken Hughes Las Vegas Review-Journal
The landmark Pentagon Papers case, while profoundly important, was only the public part of the President’s reaction to the leak. Privately, Nixon wasn’t much worried about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, since the secret history cuts off in mid-1968, months before he was even elected president. Nixon was worried about something else, something that could damage him politically — the potential leak of his own Vietnam secrets.
Ken Hughes Salon
A timeline of Nixon’s reactions—from the day the New York Times printed its story to the day after the Supreme Court ruling.
Ken Hughes
Thanks to the Miller Center’s collection of Secret White House Tapes, we know Chennault, a top Republican fundraiser, was a go-between for Nixon in 1968 to disrupt peace talks.
Ken Hughes, a research specialist at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, noted Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were each cited for obstruction of justice when Congress attempted to impeach them. “Contrary to what...Trump's lawyer is saying, presidents can be guilty of obstruction of justice,” he told the Daily News in an email.
Ken Hughes New York Daily News