Experts

Ken Hughes

Research Specialist
Ken Hughes CV.pdf

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. 

 

Featured Publications

Fatal Politics
Fatal Politics

Ken Hughes

Chasing Shadows
Chasing Shadows

Ken Hughes

Ken Hughes News Feed

Los Angeles Times
Thousands of JFK assassination documents are released, though Trump orders some to be kept secret for now
To experts like Hughes, who studies the presidency, the records when they are released are likely to reveal juicy tidbits about American history that are unlikely to have much to do with the assassination itself. “The main thing I get out of these documents is great information about covert operations during the Kennedy administration,” Hughes said. “These covert operations were to overthrow and assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba. They weren’t to overthrow and assassinate the president of the United States.”
Ken Hughes Los Angeles Times
Boston.com
4 things to know in anticipation of this week’s release of the JFK assassination records
“The odds that this 1 percent will provide proof of a conspiracy are slim,” Ken Hughes, a presidential researcher at the University of Virginia, told Boston.com. “But they will fill in some important details.”
Ken Hughes Boston.com
BBC
BBC Sunday Breakfast
Miller Center expert Ken Hughes is interviewed on BBC Radio.
Ken Hughes BBC Radio
CNN
Trump plans to release classified JFK documents
Ken Hughes, a presidential researcher at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, told CNN the files could shed light on the US involvement in the attempts to assassinate Castro as well as the US-approved coup of South Vietnamese leader Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963. "There's a lot for conventional historians -- we non-conspiracy theorists -- to look forward to," he said.
Ken Hughes CNN
UVA Today
Miller Center experts aid PBS production of 'The Vietnam War'
With its sweeping look at one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, the PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” captivated viewers around the country when it debuted in late September. The epic 18-hour documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick takes a deep dive into the conflict with perspectives and reflections from people on all sides of the war. Experts at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center worked as consultants on the project to ensure that those perspectives included the private musings of three American presidents.
Marc Selverstone and Ken Hughes UVA Today
Salon
Nixon, Vietnam and the politics of polarization
Nixon was a master of the dark art of orchestrating political tensions, resentments and animosities for maximum political gain. The divisions he sowed in America have never entirely healed.
Ken Hughes Salon