Cartooning the White House: Celebrating comic artist Patrick Oliphant

Cary served as a White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, authoring more than 100 of his presidential addresses. She also has ghostwritten several books related to President Bush’s life and career and served as Senior Writer for Communications for the 1988 Bush-Quayle presidential campaign.

Today, Cary is asked to write speeches, presentations, and reports for a variety of national political, corporate, and nonprofit leaders. Her assignments have included State of the Union responses, Republican National Convention addresses, and TED talks. She is a former practitioner senior fellow at the Miller Center.

Germany is an associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina and nonresident research fellow at the Miller Center, where works with the Presidential Recordings Program.

His research interests lie in the American South, race relations, and poverty, and he is completing a book titled Seeking the Great Society: A Southern City After Jim Crow, 1964–1974, a grassroots study of the civil rights and antipoverty movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their role in the transformation of race relations and political culture in New Orleans.

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. 

Over the course of a 20-year career in public service, Chris Lu, the Miller Center's Teresa A. Sullivan Practitioner Senior Fellow, worked in all three branches of the federal government, including seven years in the Obama administration. From 2014 to 2017, Lu was the deputy secretary of labor, having been confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. From 2009 to 2013, he was the White House cabinet secretary and assistant to the president, serving as the president’s primary liaison to the federal agencies. At the end of the first term, Obama said: “Through his dedication and tireless efforts, Chris has overseen one of the most stable and effective cabinets in history—a cabinet that has produced extraordinary accomplishments over the past four years.” 

Pach is associate professor in the department of history. He specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations and recent U.S. history. His research has focused on U.S. involvement in the Cold War and the Vietnam War as well as the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Reagan presidencies. He has a particular interest in television coverage of international issues and the intersections between politics, popular culture, and international history.

Professor Pach has served on several committees of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations(opens in a new window). He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of H-DIPLO(opens in a new window), a part of the H-NET Electronic Discussion Network(opens in a new window).

Strong is the William Lyne Wilson Professor of Politics and was a Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin in the 2013-14 academic year. He earned his PhD at the University of Virginia and has been at Washington and Lee since 1989. Earlier in his career he taught at Tulane University and the University College of Wales. In 1988-89 he was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow and worked in the offices of Congressman Lee Hamilton and Senator Richard Lugar. In 2005 he was a visiting scholar at University College and the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. From 2008 to 2013 he served in senior administrative positions at Washington and Lee, first as Associate Provost and then as Interim Provost. He has published essays in a variety of journals and national newspapers and his recent speeches and op-eds can be found at: https://strong.academic.wlu.edu.

Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the University of Virginia, where he has also served as dean of the Graduate School and director of the Miller Center. His scholarly work has focused on critical episodes in American and world history. 

He was a trial and appellate lawyer and then a career diplomat before taking academic positions at Harvard, then Virginia. Before and during his academic career, he has served at all levels of American government. His federal service during five administrations has included positions in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. His last full-time government position was as the counselor of the Department of State, a deputy to Secretary Condoleezza Rice. 

Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Miller Center. He has published multiple books, the most recent of which is Resilient America: Electing Nixon, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (2014). Other recent books are The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014, with Sidney Milkis (2015); The Presidency and the Political System, 10th ed. (2014); and The Elections of 2012 (2013). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Politics and Political Science Quarterly and in periodicals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.