Timothy Naftali

Head of Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University

The Real Game: Secrecy in a world of Benedict Cumberbatch and Edward Snowden  |   Thursday, April 9  |   4:30pm   |  007 Kemeny Hall

Timothy Naftali is the Head of Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. Naftali was Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, a division of the National Archives and Records Administration. As the first director of the federal Nixon Library, Naftali oversaw the release of an estimated 1.3 million pages of presidential materials and 600 hours of Nixon tapes, and the creation of nearly 150 video oral histories. He wrote and curated the Library’s widely praised multi-media Watergate Gallery, which opened in 2011.

A native of Montreal, Naftali has a B.A. from Yale, an M.A. in American Foreign Policy and International Economics from Johns Hopkins, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from Harvard. He has taught at the University of Hawaii, Yale, the University of Virginia, and is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at NYU. At the University of Virginia, he was the founding director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, which transcribes and analyzes the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon tapes. Naftali is currently completing a presidential biography of John F. Kennedy. He is also the author or co-author of “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964; Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism; and Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, which won the Duke of Westminster medal for military literature in 2007.

Sponsored by the Government Department and The Dickey Center for International Understanding