William Waldo Cameron Forum on Public Affairs - 12/4/2000
Michael Beschloss
Michael Beschloss is an award-winning historian of the Presidency and the author of six books. He is a regular commentator on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and is a contributor to ABC News.
Beschloss was born in Chicago on November 30, 1955. He is an alumnus of Phillips Academy (Andover), Williams College and Harvard University. From 1982 until 1986 he was Historian at the Smithsonian Institution. From 1985 until 1987 he was a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, England. From 1987 until 1996 he was a Senior Fellow of the Annenberg Foundation in Washington, D.C.
His most recent book was the national bestseller Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964, the first volume of a projected trilogy. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 won the Ambassador Book Prize for American Studies and was also a national bestseller.
Mr. Beschloss is currently working on a history of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which will be published by Simon & Schuster, as well as the second volume of his trilogy on the Lyndon Johnson tapes. He is also the author of Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair and co-author of At the Highest Levels: The End of the Cold War.
He is a member of the American Historical Association and the Society of American Historians, and sits on the following Boards of Trustees: The White House Historical Association, the National Archives Foundation, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello) and the Urban Institute. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Afsaneh, who is Vice President and Treasurer of the World Bank, and their two sons, Alexander and Cyrus.