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Award-winning historian Michael Beschloss will be the principal speaker at Lafayette’s 172nd Commencement Saturday, May 19, and will receive an honorary degree.
Lafayette president Daniel Weiss said, “I am delighted that Michael Beschloss will address our graduates and parents at Commencement. A historian of the first rank, he has made significant contributions to our knowledge of the American presidency and advanced our understanding of the leadership and decision-making of the nation’s chief executives.”
Beschloss is the author of nine books, including, most recently, the acclaimed New York Times best-seller The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945, published by Simon & Schuster, which Amazon.com declared the best-selling history book in America in 2002.
Newsweek has called Beschloss “the nation’s leading presidential historian.” He serves as NBC News’ Presidential Historian—the first time any major network has created such a position—and appears regularly on Meet the Press, Today, and other NBC network programs. He is a regular on Imus in the Morning and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In 2005 he was awarded an Emmy for his role in creating the three-part Discovery Channel series Decisions that Shook the World, which focused on Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Beschloss was born in Chicago in 1955. An alumnus of Williams College, he is the only political historian of national stature to have an advanced degree from Harvard Business School. He was a historian on the staff of the Smithsonian Institution from 1982-86, senior associate member at Oxford University in England 1986-87, and senior fellow of the Annenberg Foundation, Washington, D.C., from 1988-96.
Of The Conquerors, The New York Times Book Review said in a front-page review that the “vigorously written” book is “history as it was spoken at the time, and there is not a dull page.”
Taking Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1997) was the first volume of Beschloss’s highly praised trilogy on President Johnson’s newly released secret tapes. The Wall Street Journal called it “sheer marvelous history,” the New York Times editorial page, “an important event.” The second volume, Reaching for Glory (Simon & Schuster, 2001), was called “an incomparable portrait of a President at work” by the New York Times Book Review. Both books were national best sellers.
Beschloss’s first book, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton, 1980), started as his senior honors thesis at Williams College. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (Harper, 1986), was called “a grand narrative . . . crowded with well-drawn portraits” by The New Yorker. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (HarperCollins, 1991), won the Ambassador Book Prize and was called by TheNew Yorker the “definitive” history of John Kennedy and the Cold War.
Beschloss also co-wrote At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Little, Brown, 1993) with Strobe Talbott. As literary executor for the late Newsweek columnist Meg Greenfield, he edited Greenfield’s posthumously published book Washington (PublicAffairs, 2001).
Beschloss recently completed a book about major, controversial decisions by American presidents. Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 is scheduled for release by Simon & Schuster in May.
Beschloss is the recipient of the Order of Lincoln from the Lincoln Academy of Illinois and Harry S. Truman Public Service Award from the City of Independence, Mo. He is a trustee of the White House Historical Association, National Archives Foundation, Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello), and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and a member of the board of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Afsaneh, who is president and chief executive officer of the Rock Creek Group, a hedge fund of funds, and their two sons.