Following recent changes in her upcoming play's rehearsal schedule, Wendy Wasserstein has been forced to give up her position as this summer's Montgomery Fellow. Fortunately for Dartmouth students, acclaimed author, professor and presidential scholar Robert Dallek will be stepping in to take her place as the Summer term's Montgomery Fellow.
Dallek already has a successful and recent history as a fellow at the College. He served as a Montgomery Fellow last summer and taught a history class on the American presidency.
"We had a splendid experience," Dallek said. "Summer's a delightful time to be there [at Dartmouth] and Montgomery House is just magnificent. I told Susan Wright when I first got in there, 'How do you ever get people out of here?'"
Although Dallek will not be teaching this summer, he will be conducting three student programs addressing leadership. On Aug. 2, Dallek will also deliver the Montgomery Fellow lecture, "The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents," which will look at presidential successes and failures. Dallek's peers seem excited about his return to Hanover.
"The history and government departments are just responding enthusiastically as fellow academics," Executive Director of the Montgomery Endowment Susan Wright said. "And one of the goals of the [Montgomery Endowment steering] committee is to bring back Montgomery Fellows who have been extremely effective as teachers and visitors."
History professor David Lagomarsino, who worked with Dallek last summer, echoed Wright's excitement over Dallek's return.
"It was a joy to have Robert Dallek in the department last summer, and I was very pleased to learn that he is returning," Lagomarsino said.
For many students who took Dallek's history class last summer, "effective" is an understatement. Samantha Lane '06, who later saw her former professor on CNN as a presidential expert, characterized her experience with Dallek as one of the pinnacles of her Dartmouth experience.
"Dallek's class was incredibly rewarding and inspiring," Samantha Lane '06 said. "It is always fun to take a class from someone who is so brilliant and incredibly well versed in his or her subject...and yet is so humble."
Dan Kovler '06, who also took Dallek's class, characterized the acclaimed scholar as "passionate about teaching, and still very much down-to-earth."
Dallek said his favorite experience from his previous Montgomery Fellowship was reading the papers students composed for his course, papers that he found "impressive" and some even "worth publishing." In addition to paper assignments, Dallek also ensured each class included time for discussion.
"The students asked such penetrating, thoughtful questions on the day's topics that I found it quite stimulating and appealing," he said. "I very much enjoyed going to class and having that kind of interaction with the students."
In addition to his Tuesday lecture and student programs, he will visit several courses within the government and history departments.
Dallek is currently working on a biography of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, slated for a 2007 release. He recently spent a year scouring Nixon and Kissinger's archival materials, working through 3,700 hours of Nixon phone recordings and 20,000 pages of Kissinger's telephone transcripts that he describes as "just the tip of the iceberg."
Dallek is the bestselling author of "An Unfinished Life," which unearthed the truth about President John F. Kennedy's health problems. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and has taught at Columbia, UCLA and Oxford University. He holds an honorary degree from Oxford, and is currently a professor a Boston University. He is the author of several books, including his classic two-volume biography of "Lyndon Johnson, Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant." He has won the Bancroft Prize, among numerous other awards for scholarship and teaching. In addition to authoring books, Dallek is a frequent television and radio commentator and has written for the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
