Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves is a writer, columnist, and Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He has written many presidential biographies including President Kennedy: Profile of Power, which was honored by Time magazine as the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, and his most recent book, Portrait of Camelot: A Thousand Days in the Kennedy White House, released in 2010.

Articles by this Author

My Years with Ronald Reagan, February/March 2006 | Vol. 57, No. 1

What a skeptical biographer discovered about a very elusive subject

The Books That Mean the Most to Me, November/December 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 6

Why G.W. Bush's Executive Order 13233 Must Not Stand, August/September 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 4

A recent presidential edict will make it harder for historians to practice their trade.

Coya Knutson: The Woman of the Century, December 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 8

You’ve likely never heard of her.

Presidential Scandal, May/June 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 3

I’m Sorry, Mr. President, December 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 8

A VETERAN JOURNALIST reflects on how public discourse has been tarnished by the press’s relentless war against presidents, including his own biggest offense.

1954, December 1994 | Vol. 45, No. 8

America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.

My Six Years with JFK, November 1993 | Vol. 44, No. 7

Living with an endlessly vexing and compelling President thirty years after Dallas

“The Lines of Control Have Been Cut”, September 1993 | Vol. 44, No. 5

Jack Kennedy came into the White House determined to dismantle his Republican predecessor’s rigid, formal staff organization, in favor of a spontaneous, flexible, hands-on management style. Thirty years later, Bill Clinton seems determined to do the same thing. He would do well to remember that what it got JFK was the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.

The Paris Tribune At One Hundred, November 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 7

Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.