Category: National politics

ROBERT KENNEDY, a Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, served for 35 years in various government postings, including Civilian Deputy Commandant at the NATO Defense College in Rome, Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College, and Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. His most recent book examines the labyrinth of complexities that the intelligence community faces in trying to provide quality intelligence to support American foreign policy and national security interests.

Mr. Kennedy spoke at a Miller Center Forum on March 27, 2009.

MARC J. SELVERSTONE moderated this Virginia Festival of the Book event, a discussion with JAMES G. BLIGHT and JANET M. LANG of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies about their new book, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Blight and Lang co-direct critical oral history projects on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the collapse of U.S.-Soviet ditente in the Carter-Brezhnev period, and the Vietnam War. They served as advisers to Errol Morris’ Academy Award-winning documentary film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Blight is the author of a dozen books on the recent history of U.S. foreign policy, and Lang is also an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

The forum took place at the Miller Center of Public Affairs on March 20, 2009.

This Virginia Festival of the Book event featured MARC J. SELVERSTONE, associate professor with the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center and JAMES GOLDGEIER, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.  Selverstone’s work focuses on the secret Oval Office recordings of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, with an emphasis on foreign policy; in particular, Vietnam. His most recent book is Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2009). Goldgeier has taught at Cornell University and Stanford University, and has served at the State Department and on the National Security Council staff. He is the author of Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and co-author of Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War (Brookings Institution Press, 2003). His most recent book is America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (Public Affairs, 2008), with Derek Chollet.

The presentation was made at a Miller Center Forum on March 20, 2009.