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

Three little Nixonian words swept the web at the news President Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey: “Saturday Night Massacre.” But whether this president shares Nixon’s fate will depend on whether the firing falls into a category captured by three other Nixonian words: “obstruction of justice.”
Ken Hughes Miller Center
Not only is Kushner's role exceptional in its scope, but Ken Hughes said it's also unheard of, given his lack of experience. Kushner brings no diplomatic, military or foreign-policy track record to the Herculean tasks before him. "Zero," Hughes said. "I can't think of any precedent for it."
Ken Hughes CBC News (Canada)
“I see echoes with the past,” Ken Hughes, a researcher at the University of Virginia Miller Center, a think tank that studies the presidency, said in an interview. “It is clear that Trump is very defensive and he is very worried,” said Hughes, who wrote a book on the Republican interference in the Vietnam peace talks.
Ken Hughes Los Angeles Times
Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (2014) by Ken Hughes, a University of Virginia researcher, tells the full story. Anna Chennault, the widow of General Claire Chennault of World War II Flying Tigers fame, and a well-known Republican activist, was at a secret meeting in New York in July 1968 with Nixon and the South Vietnamese ambassador. Nixon told the ambassador that Chennault was his designated link with the South Vietnamese government. The “Chennault affair’ followed by Nixon’s proposed break-in at the Brookings Institution is mentioned in the memoirs of John Dean, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman as well as those of Chennault herself and also Theodore White’s “The Making of a President 1968.”
Ken Hughes CounterPunch
Our First Year team of experts offers essential readings on the 37th president
Ken Hughes Miller Center
Nixon’s myth is shattered by the evidence on Nixon’s tapes and in his White House documents. The tapes tell a story that is both true and, potentially, lifesaving. Once we remember this hidden part of our past, we will no longer be condemned to repeat it.
Ken Hughes Salon