Uploaded March 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
The United States has waged wars, large and small, almost continually across two and a half centuries. No figure looms as large in that history as the American president, the embodiment of national will, the nation’s preeminent diplomat, and the commander in chief of its armed forces. How have presidents made decisions about war and peace? How have they balanced American ideals with defense of the nation’s interests? Why have they succeeded in achieving their goals in some cases but not in others?
Marc J. Selverstone is associate professor in presidential studies and chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. He is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard, 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. He is also the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition(Virginia, 2010–).
The United States has waged wars, large and small, almost continually across two and a half centuries. No figure looms as large in that history as the American president, the embodiment of national will, the nation’s preeminent diplomat, and the commander in chief of its armed forces. How have presidents made decisions about war and peace? How have they balanced American ideals with defense of the nation’s interests? Why have they succeeded in achieving their goals in some cases but not in others?
Marc J. Selverstone is associate professor in presidential studies and chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. He is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard, 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. He is also the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition(Virginia, 2010–).
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Paul Gregory is an expert on Russia and is currently a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. A pioneer in the study of Soviet and Russian economics, his textbook on the Russian economy was used to teach more than two generations of students. But Gregory’s latest book is on a subject that he has been reluctant to address for nearly six decades: his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald and his young wife Marina. Gregory was one of the few people who actually knew them. His inside account of the Oswalds’s marriage offers a disturbing portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Gregory believes acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy.
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