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

President Lyndon Johnson talked about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, sending ground troops to Vietnam and Congressional hearings on the war. Participants included Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. President Johnson also confered with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman and longtime adviser Richard Russell. Historian Ken Hughes from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who was a consultant for "The Vietnam War," is interviewed.
Ken Hughes C-SPAN Radio
The Republican nominee colluded with a foreign government to win the presidential election. The nominee was Richard Nixon, the foreign government was South Vietnam, and the election was 1968. This “sordid story,” as then-President Lyndon B. Johnson described it to Nixon (in a telephone conversation LBJ secretly tape-recorded), is one of the many narrative threads masterfully woven by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick into episode seven of "The Vietnam War," titled “The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968–May 1969).”
Ken Hughes Salon
Journalists Drew Pearson, Tom Ottenad, Theodore White, Jules Witcover and Seymour Hersh advanced the story, bit by bit, over the years. So did book-writing Johnson administration officials like Clark Clifford and William Bundy and University of Virginia scholar Ken Hughes, in a 2014 book, Chasing Shadows.
Ken Hughes POLITICO Magazine
The top seven scathing outbursts in presidential history, as chosen by the Miller Center's Guian McKee, Russell Riley, and Ken Hughes.
Ken Hughes, Guian McKee, Russell Riley UVA Today
“Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.” With those words, Richard Nixon became the first—and so far only—president to announce his resignation.
Ken Hughes Miller Center
For the fullest account of Nixon's intrigue, and how it has come to light over the years, see Chasing Shadows, a 2014 book by Ken Hughes, a researcher at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
Ken Hughes Vox