Carolyn Woods Eisenberg on Nixon, Kissinger & the Wars in Southeast Asia

in conversation with Timothy Naftali

Thursday, April 27, 7 pm on Zoom

 

Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative that brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. While recognizing the distinctive personalities and ideas of these two men, this study more broadly conveys the competing roles and impact of the professional military, the Congress, and a mobilized peace movement.

 

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a Professor of US History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49, winner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize. She has written op-eds and done media appearances for numerous outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has been a consultant to several members of Congress and is legislative coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.

 

Director of NYU’s Undergraduate Public Policy Program and, since 2016, a CNN presidential historian, Tim Naftali was appointed the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2006. Naftali oversaw the release of over a million pages of documents, over 350 hours of the Nixon tapes, established the first video oral history program for a presidential library, and authored the Library’s Watergate gallery. Naftali, who wrote a biography of George H. W. Bush, is currently at work on a presidential biography of John F. Kennedy. His byline appears regularly in The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs and he has appeared in many documentaries, the most recent being “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes” and “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

 

Register for this Zoom Webinar event here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lhLfcj-8StWKaXkTiUtzSA

 

All of the Leon Levy Center for Biography events, including this one, are recorded and may be watched here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcOQfzxqQDGPLE38YAjIxQw/videos