The Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment at Dartmouth will bring a series of presidential biographers to campus Winter term to address the issues of presidential leadership and power at the end of the 20th century.
The program was planned before President Bill Clinton's current impeachment proceedings and is not intended to directly address the situation in Washington.
"The intent is to take Dartmouth's last Winter and Spring terms of the 20th century and examine how certain presidents in this century have used -- or misused -- the power of their office," said Barbara Gerstner, assistant provost and executive director of the Montgomery Endowment.
The format departs from the traditional Montgomery format, where visiting speakers stay at the College to give multiple lectures and interact with students. Last winter Montgomery Fellow August Wilson stayed the entire term and taught a class.
This term, however, six presidential biographers will each give a single public lecture in Cook Auditorium.
Biographer and 1998 commencement speaker Doris Kearns Goodwin returns to Dartmouth on Tuesday, Feb. 16 to discuss Franklin Roosevelt, the subject of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "No Ordinary Time."
Goodwin, a former assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, commentates on PBS's "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and has contributed to PBS documentaries "LBJ," "The Kennedys," "FDR," and "The History of Baseball."
In her Commencement address last June, Goodwin told the audience to seek "not perfection of work alone but perfection of life" and said any measure of success will "not be worth it in the long run" if students do not enjoy their daily routine.
She said students should avoid the situation Johnson, who was intent on the acquisition of political power, encountered during the last year of his life, when "the realm of his power was taken from him" and "he was drained of all vitality."
Biographer, historian and lecturer David McCullough will begin the series Tuesday, Jan. 12. Familiar to television viewers as host of the PBS series "The American Experience" and narrator of "The Civil War," he has won the National Book Award twice and the Pulitzer Prize for "Truman."
Pulitzer Prizewinner Robert Caro will discuss President Lyndon Johnson on Thursday, Jan. 21. Caro's first two books on Johnson, which traced the president's early career, garnered him a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy are the subject of Michael Beschloss' talk Tuesday, Feb. 2. A commentator on PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Beschloss is the author of "Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair"; "Eisenhower: A Centennial Life"; and "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963."
Edmund Morris will discuss President Ronald Reagan, the subject of his forthcoming book, on Tuesday, Feb. 9. He has been working on "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" for 13 years, and was granted access to Reagan's papers, friends and family.
Particularly timely is David Maraniss' lecture Tuesday, Feb. 23 on Clinton. A reporter for The Washington Post, Maraniss won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Clinton's 1992 campaign, then took a sabbatical to write the Clinton biography "First in his Class."
During Spring term David Grubin, documentary filmmaker for PBS' "The American Experience," will discuss challenges filmmakers face explaining aspects of presidential leadership.
Communications consultant Robert A. Wilson put together the lecture series on behalf of the Montgomery Endowment, which brings speakers to Dartmouth from academic and nonacademic fields.
