JEFFREY A. ENGEL is founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and a Senior Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies. Educated at Cornell University, Oxford University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which he received his PhD in American history in 2001, he has taught history and international affairs at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M University, where he was the Verlin and Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Professor. A frequent lecture and media commentator on historical and contemporary affairs, Engel has also authored or edited twelve books on American foreign policy, including his latest, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.
JON MEACHAM is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, and Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville with his wife and children.
TIMOTHY NAFTALI teaches at New York University, where he is a clinical associate professor of public service at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a clinical associate professor of history. From 2006 to 2011, Naftali was the last director of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, and then was the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he curated a new, nonpartisan Watergate gallery and interviewed more than 110 former Nixon officials and others from the era for the library’s oral history project. His books include “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964, a study of the Cuban missile crisis (with Aleksandr Fursenko), and George H. W. Bush.
PETER BAKER is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC. He was coauthor of the original Washington Post story in January 1998 that broke the news of the investigation into Bill Clinton’s efforts to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky that led to his impeachment. Baker has covered four presidents for the Post and the Times, including Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump. He and his wife, Susan Glasser, served as Moscow bureau chiefs of the Post and covered the opening months of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Baker is author of four previous books, including The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Washington with Glasser and their son, Theodore.