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

Why it feels like we're fast-forwarding through Watergate—and why congressional committees must subpoena any and all Trump tapes.
Ken Hughes Ken Hughes
“The big question hanging over the hearing is whether the president committed obstruction of justice. The focus will be not just on every contact and conversation Trump had with Comey on the Russia investigation, but what Comey made of them at the time. Did he think the president was trying to influence the investigation? To protect National Security Adviser Michael Flynn? To clear his presidential campaign of suspicion? To remove a potential sore point in U.S. relations with Russia?"
Ken Hughes UVA Today
At 12:30 a.m., Frank Wills “cut all lights out in hall” and began to investigate. When he found a door taped open, he called the DC police. It was just before 2 a.m. So began the biggest scandal in presidential history.
Tom van der Voort Miller Center
Ken Hughes talked with C-SPAN's Washington Journal about the history of past presidents secretly recording conversations in the Oval Office.
Ken Hughes C-SPAN
“Nixon was much more circumspect than Donald Trump and, frankly, much more aware of what his own legal exposure was,” said Ken Hughes, a scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “I was stunned when President Trump suggested that he might have tapes of his meetings with director Comey, because those would become the subject of subpoenas. They would be seen as evidence.”
Ken Hughes Washington Post
Miller Center expert Ken Hughes talks about the controversy around alleged ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Ken Hughes Rundschau (Germany)