UVA Club of Fairfield/Westchester: Virtual Conversation - Marc Selverstone
The UVA Club of Fairfield/Westchester invited all alumni, friends, and families to join us for an entertaining and informative virtual evening with Marc Selverstone, associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program.
Professor Selverstone, who hails from Westport, CT and graduated from Staples High School, provided an overview of the Recordings Program with highlights of secretly taped meetings and phone conversations from various presidents. He also highlighted what he and his team are now working on, as well as his current project on Kennedy and Vietnam. The program, coming right around President's Day, was perfectly timed to offer insights into the workings of the White House.
The Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of UVA, established the Presidential Recordings Program in 1998 to make the once-secret presidential tapes accessible to citizens, journalists, policymakers, scholars, students, teachers—indeed to all who have an interest or investment in the workings of American democracy.
As chair of the Recordings Program, Selverstone edits the secret White House tapes of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. He is the general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition, the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes, published by the University of Virginia Press.
Professor Selverstone earned a BA degree in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard, forthcoming 2022) and Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard, 2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.