Michael Beschloss named the Fall 2012 Distinguished Lecture Speaker
Michael Beschloss will visit Hobbs as the Fall 2012 Jack Maddox Distinguished Lecture speaker on November 12, 2012. The lecture will take place at Tydings Auditorium at 7:00 p.m. Tickets for this event are FREE, but required to enter. Contact Laurie Dean at 575-492-2108 or at tickets@usw.edu to reserve your tickets beginning September 10, 2012. You may also pick up tickets from an area ticket location beginning September 10, 2012.
Michael Beschloss is an award-winning historian and the best-selling author of nine books. He also co-authored, with Caroline Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy (2011).
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 all NBC network programs. He is a regular commentator on PBS News Hour. In 2005, he won an Emmy for his role in creating the Discovery
Channel series Decisions that Shook the World, of which he was the host.
Beschloss was born in Chicago in 1955. An alumnus of Williams College, he also has an advanced degree from the Harvard Business School. He has been an historian on the staff of the Smithsonian Institution (1982-1986), a senior associate member at Oxford University in England (1986-1987) and a senior fellow of the Annenberg Foundation in Washington, D.C. (1988-1996).
In 2007, Simon and Schuster published his best-selling book, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989. The book won high praise from readers including Kirkus Reviews who called it, “Engrossing. . .marvelous. . .and judicious. . . History written with subtlety, verve and an almost novelistic appreciation for the complexities of human nature and Presidential politics.”
Of The Conquerors (Simon & Schuster, 2002), The New York Times Book Review said in a front-page review that the “vigorously written" book was "history as it was spoken at the time, and there is not a dull page.” The book was a New York Times bestseller for three months and was Amazon’s bestselling history book of the year.
Taking Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1997) was Beschloss' first volume on President Lyndon 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 sequel, 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’ 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 (Harper Collins, 1991), won the Ambassador Book Prize and was called by The New 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 (Public Affairs, 2001).
Beschloss holds honorary doctorates from Williams College, St. Mary’s College (Maryland) and Lafayette College. He has also received the State of Illinois’s Order of Lincoln and the Harry S. Truman Public Service Award from Independence, Missouri. He is a trustee of the White House Historical Association, the National Archives Foundation and the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two sons.