Stephen Kennedy Smith and Douglas Brinkley

Douglas Brinkley

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Audubon. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” His recent Cronkite won the Sperber Prize for Best Book in Journalism and was a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year. The Great Deluge won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of History. A specialist on U.S. foreign relations history and modern international history, he was previously the Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also served as vice provost and as the director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Logevall is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize. His other recent works include America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity and the college-level textbook A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. 

Ron Suskind

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer-winning journalist, bestselling author, and the founder of Sidekicks. He is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers and the critically acclaimed A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. His latest bestseller, Life, Animated, chronicles his family’s twenty-year journey raising and connecting to their autistic son. His other books include Confidence Men, The Way of the World, The One Percent Doctrine, and The Price of Loyalty. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he won the Pulitzer Prize, and is currently the Senior Fellow at Harvard's Center for Ethics.

Photo credit: Marissa Rauch Photography

Samantha Power

Samantha Power is a Professor of Practice at Harvard. She served in the Cabinet of President Barack Obama and as US Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017, and as Obama’s human rights advisor from 2009 to 2013. Power’s book "A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Her latest book, The Education of an Idealist, is now in paperback with an updated afterword and was selected as one of the best books of 2019 by outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, National Public Radio, Time, and Vanity Fair.

Photo Credit: Stephen Kelleghan

Stephen Kennedy Smith

Stephen Kennedy Smith is a lecturer at the Sloan School of Management as well as a fellow at the Connection Science Group at MIT. He received his BA from Harvard University, JD from Columbia University, and EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has served on the staff of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees and is a three-time recipient of the Danforth Award for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard University. He continues to be active in Democratic politics and lives in New York City.