VIETNAM AND THE PRESIDENCY
A Conference Sponsored by the Presidential Libraries and the National Archives
March 10 -11, 2006 Boston, Massachusetts

Friday, March 10, 2006

1:00 p.m.            Welcome    

Deborah Leff, Director, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum                              

1:05 to 2:35 p.m. How We Got In: The United States, Asia, and Vietnam

George Herring, Alumni Professor of History, University of Kentucky
Robert D. Schulzinger, Professor of History, University of Colorado, Boulder
Marilyn Young, Professor of History, New York University
Moderator: Allen Weinstein, The Archivist of the United States

2:50 to 4:45 p.m. Vietnam and Presidential Tapes

On Kennedy:            David Kaiser, Professor of Strategy and Policy, Naval War College
On Johnson:             Timothy Naftali, Associate Professor and Director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs.
On Nixon:                 Jeffrey Kimball, Professor of History, Miami University
Moderator: Sharon Fawcett, Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries

5:00 to 5:30 p.m. Keynote Speaker

David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winner for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The New York Times and author of The Best and The Brightest, the acclaimed critical history of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam

Saturday, March 11, 2006
  Moderator for all sessions:
Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News anchorman

9:00 a.m.               Welcome

Caroline Kennedy, President, John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

9:05 to 9:30 a.m.     Interview with President Jimmy Carter -- Video presentation

9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Inside the White House

Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Deputy Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Deputy National Security Adviser to President Nixon; White House Chief of Staff to Presidents Nixon and Ford; Secretary of State under President Reagan
Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor to President Nixon; Secretary of State under President Ford
Theodore Sorensen, Special Counsel to President Kennedy
Jack Valenti, Special Assistant to President Johnson

11:30 to 12: 30 p.m. Lunch

12:45 to 2:15 p.m. The Media and the Role of Public Opinion

Steve Bell, ABC News war correspondent in the early 1970s
Frances Fitzgerald, Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award-winning author for Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
Dan Rather, CBS News war correspondent in the 1960s

2:30 to 4:15 p.m.      Lessons Learned

Wesley K. Clark, decorated Vietnam veteran and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander
Chuck Hagel, decorated Vietnam veteran and Nebraska’s Senior Senator
Bob Herbert, veteran who served in Korea in the 1960s and New York Times columnist
Pete Peterson, decorated Vietnam veteran and first American Ambassador appointed to Vietnam after the war

Biographical Data

Dr. George Herring is the Alumni Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught since 1969. His field of specialization is United States foreign relations, and he has written extensively about and regularly teaches courses on the Vietnam War. He served as chair of the department of history from 1973 to 1976 and 1988 to 1996.

His book America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 is known as one of the most comprehensive and balanced books on the Vietnam War and is the most widely used textbook in America on the subject.

His other books include Aid to Russia, 1941-1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, The Origins of the Cold War; The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius; The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The “Negotiating Volumes” of the Pentagon Papers; and LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War. He is presently writing a volume on U.S. foreign relations in Oxford University Press’s History of the United States series.

Professor Herring has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

He served as editor of the scholarly journal Diplomatic History from 1982 to 1986 and as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1989. In 2002, he was awarded the Society’s Norman A. Graebner Prize for distinguished contributions to the field. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, and was visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy from 1993 to 1994 and at the University of Richmond in 2001.

He received his B.A. from Roanoke College in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1965.

Dr. Robert D. Schulzinger is the Director of the International Affairs Program and Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation since 1996. He has written extensively about U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War.

His book A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 is considered one of the best analyses of failed United States policy. For Schulzinger, the key to understanding Vietnam is historical time. “For the Vietnamese,” he writes, “the fight represented the latest phase of a centuries-long, even millennial, effort to define themselves and cast out invaders. Vietnamese nationalists and revolutionaries who fought the French and Americans seemed infinitely patient, serenely confident that eventually outsiders would have to go. But for first the French, and then the Americans and their Vietnamese allies, war seemed to go on forever. The French and the Americans grew increasingly frustrated and impatient when the war did not end on their terms.”

He is author or coauthor of eleven other books, including Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy, U.S. Diplomacy since 1900 and Present Tense: The United States Since 1945. He is currently working on a book entitled A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War.

He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1971.

Dr. Marilyn Young is Professor of History and former chair of the department at New York University. She specializes in U.S. foreign relations, particularly U.S.-East Asian relations.

Her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 is considered one of the first to give equal weight to the Vietnamese and American sides of the Vietnam War and one of the best books to place the War in the context of centuries of East West relations. It won the Berkshire Women’s History Award.

Young is a member of the councils of the American Historical Association and the Society of American Historians of Foreign Policy. Among the numerous awards she has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and three university distinguished teaching awards.

She is the author of several other books including Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895-1901 and Vietnam: A Documented History. She was one of the editors of Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism, 1959-1975.

She received her B.A. from Vassar College in 1957 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963.

Dr. Allen Weinstein is the ninth Archivist of the United States. In 1985, he founded the D.C.-based Center for Democracy, a non-profit foundation to promote and strengthen the democratic process. He served as its President through 2003. From 1982-84 he directed the research study that led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and was Acting President of the Endowment.

His international awards include the United Nations Peace Medal, The Council of Europe’s Silver Medal, and awards from the presidents of Nicaragua and Romania for assistance in their countries’ democratization processes. His other awards and fellowships have included two Senior Fulbright Lectureships, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the Commonwealth Fund lectureship at the University of London, and a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship.

His books include The Story of America; The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America ~ The Stalin Era; Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (which received an American Book Award nomination); Freedom and Crisis: An American History; Between the Wars: American Foreign Policy from Versailles to Pearl Harbor; and Prelude to Populism.

He has taught history at Boston University, Georgetown University, Smith College, Columbia University and Brown University.

He received his B.A. from Columbia University, his M.A. from Yale University, and his Ph.D. from City College of New York.

Dr. David Kaiser is Professor in the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College. He is the author of American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and The Origins of the Vietnam War. Using an enormous range of source materials~ recently declassified memoranda, tapes of telephone conversations, and minutes of meetings ~ from the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, the book reveals how the policies that led to the War were developed during Eisenhower’s tenure and nearly implemented in the closing days of his administration in response to a crisis in Laos; how Kennedy immediately reversed course on Laos and refused for three years to follow recommendations for military action in Southeast Asia; and how Eisenhower’s policies reemerged in the military intervention mounted by the Johnson administration.

His other books include Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War and European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler.

He also taught at Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969 and 1976 respectively.

Dr. Timothy Naftali is Associate Professor and Director of the Presidential Recordings Program and Kremlin Decision-Making Project at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. Trained as an historian, Dr. Naftali writes political histories on the Cold War, World War II, and espionage.

As Director of the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, he oversees the team of scholars and staff responsible for transcribing thousands of hours of telephone conversations and meetings secretly recorded by Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in the White House.

He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Blindspot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism and The Presidential Recordings of John F. Kennedy, Volumes 1 and 2.

He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1983, his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1987, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993.

Dr. Jeffrey Kimball is a Professor of History at Miami University and has taught courses on diplomacy, peace, war, imperialism, popular culture, the United States, American presidents, and Western civilization since 1968.

He is the author of Nixon’s Vietnam War, which is the first book to focus exclusively on President Nixon’s direction of the Vietnam War. Based on extensive interviews with principal players and exhaustive research into recently declassified files, the book provides a complete and balanced analysis of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s complex strategy and diplomacy.

His other books include To Reason Why: The Debate About the Causes of American Involvement in the Vietnam War and The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy.

He received his B.A. from the University of New Orleans in 1963, his M.A. from Queen’s University (Ontario) in 1964, and his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 1969.

Sharon K. Fawcett is the Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries. She provides policy direction and oversight of the eleven presidential libraries in the National Archives. The Presidential Library system also includes the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff and the Presidential Materials Staff. She served as the Deputy Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries from 1997-2004.

Prior to working in the Office of Presidential Libraries, Ms. Fawcett was the Director of the User Services Division of the Office of the National Archives.

Ms. Fawcett began working at the National Archives in 1969 as an archivist on the staff of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library. She has lectured and written on presidential libraries, access to Presidential records, archival reference, research room design and security, product management, genealogy and family history, and managing human resources.

She has a B.A. degree in history and a Masters in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Mr. David Halberstam is one of the country’s most distinguished political and cultural commentators. He graduated from Harvard University in 1955 where he served as managing editor of the daily Harvard Crimson. He began his career as the one reporter on the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi and later at the Nashville Tennessean before joining the New York Times in 1960. He first came to national prominence in the early sixties as part of a handful of American reporters who refused to accept the official optimism about Vietnam and who reported that the War was being lost. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his prophetic reporting in Vietnam for the New York Times.

His landmark trilogy of books on power in America, The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and The Reckoning have won him innumerable awards as well as broad critical acclaim. They deal with, respectively, the path that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations used to take America to war in Vietnam, the dramatic and sudden rise of the power of modern media, and the ascent of the Japanese as a rival economic superpower.

Fifteen of his books have been New York Times bestsellers. The Reckoning, his prophetic account of the Japanese challenge, was voted in a Wall Street Journal poll of 400 CEO’s The Most Important Book of the Year. He was a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his post-9/11 book War in a Time of Peace. Five of his 15 bestselling books have been about sports, and two ~ The Best and The Brightest and Summer of ’49 (on an epic pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox) ~ were #1 New York Times bestsellers. His most recent book The Education of a Coach is a profile of the leadership and success of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. His next book, due out in the fall of 2007, will be an account of a key early battle of the Korean War.

Called “the best war reporter of his generation,” he is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards and 20 honorary degrees.

Mr. Brian Williams became the seventh Anchor and Managing Editor of NBC Nightly News on December 2, 2004. After one year at the helm of Nightly News, Williams is the nation’s most-watched news anchor on a broadcast that represents the largest single daily source of news in America.

Since joining NBC News in 1993, Williams has covered virtually every major breaking news event and traveled extensively around the world. From 1996 to January 2004, he was anchor and managing editor of The News with Brian Williams, a live, hour-long nightly newscast on MSNBC and then on CNBC. Williams was the anchor and managing editor of the Saturday edition of NBC Nightly News for six years before becoming anchor of the weekday edition.

In 1994, Williams was named NBC News Chief White House correspondent. Accompanying President Clinton aboard Air Force One, Williams circled the world several times, covering virtually every foreign and domestic trip by the President until 1996. He was the first NBC News correspondent to reach Baghdad after the U.S. military invasion of the city in 1993.

In 2003, Williams moderated the Democratic Presidential Candidates debate in New York. In 2000, he moderated the Republican Presidential Candidates debate in South Carolina.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Williams was on the air for days of continuous coverage. USA Today named him Best Anchor of the marathon 2000 Presidential election night coverage.

Williams is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and has lectured at Columbia University School of Journalism and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. He attended George Washington University and the Catholic University of America, both in Washington D.C., and is the recipient of six honorary doctorates.

President Jimmy Carter is the 39th President of the United States. He was born in Plains, Georgia in 1924. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and after seven years service as a naval officer, he returned to Plains. In 1962, he entered state politics, and eight years later he was elected governor of Georgia. Among the new young southern governors, he attracted attention by emphasizing ecology, efficiency in government, and the removal of racial barriers.

Jimmy Carter announced his candidacy for President in 1974. At the 1976 Democratic convention, he was nominated on the first ballot. He chose Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate.

He is the University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and founder of the nonpartisan and nonprofit Carter Center, which addresses national and international issues of public policy. Along with his wife, Rosalynn, he volunteers one week a year for Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps needy people in the United States and in other countries renovate and build homes for themselves.

He is the author of over 20 books. In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1947, launching a distinguished military career in which he eventually achieved the rank of four-star general. Haig graduated from the Naval War College in 1960, earned a master’s degree from Georgetown University in 1961, and attended the Army War College in 1966. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism during his 1966-67 combat tour in Vietnam.

General Haig was Deputy Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Senior Military Advisor to Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council; and Deputy Assistant to President Nixon for National Security Affairs, eventually becoming Nixon’s Chief of Staff. He served as the personal emissary of the President to negotiate the Vietnam ceasefire and the return of U.S. prisoners of war. He also coordinated President Nixon’s historic visit to China. After Nixon’s resignation, Haig resumed his military career as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces under Presidents Ford and Carter.

General Haig was sworn in as the 59th United States Secretary of State in 1981 during President Reagan’s first term in office, but resigned in 1982 amid disagreements with other administration officials. He wrote one book about the Reagan administration, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy, and ran an unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican nomination for president. In 1992, Haig published his memoirs, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World. He currently runs his own corporation involved in marketing and venture capital and hosts a weekly television program, World Business Review.

Dr. Henry Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923. Forced to flee Hitler’s regime, the family settled in New York City. After studying at City College, he joined the U.S. Army in 1943, serving as an interpreter and intelligence officer in Europe. Kissinger returned home in 1947 to an academic career at Harvard University, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D., becoming a professor of government and international affairs in 1957.

Kissinger served as a part-time foreign policy adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and was an intellectual force behind JFK’s “flexible response” strategy, which advocated maintaining both conventional and nuclear forces to respond to Communist aggression, rather than resorting to threats of massive nuclear retaliation. In 1968, president-elect Richard Nixon appointed Kissinger as his National Security Adviser. Nixon and Kissinger both favored “back-channel” communications and used secret negotiations to lay the groundwork for détente with the Soviet Union and open a new dialogue with Communist China. Similarly, Kissinger began secret talks with North Vietnam in 1969 in the hopes of reaching a settlement to the Vietnam War. At the same time, though, he counseled Nixon to increase bombing of North Vietnam and to expand the war into Cambodia and Laos.

In 1973 Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnam Leader, for secretly negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. The same year, he replaced William Rogers as Secretary of State, while remaining as National Security Adviser. Instrumental in brokering an end to hostilities in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel, Egypt and Syria, Kissinger then embarked on an intensive “shuttle diplomacy” effort to help mediate the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict. After President Nixon’s resignation, Kissinger remained Secretary of State under President Ford, resigning in 1977.

He has written many books and articles on United States foreign policy, international affairs, and diplomatic history. Among the many awards he has received are the Woodrow Wilson Prize, the American Institute for Public Service Award, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Dwight D. Eisenhower Distinguished Service Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty.

Mr. Theodore Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1928 and graduated from the University of Nebraska and its College of Law in 1951.

He was an attorney with the Federal Security Agency until he became assistant to Senator John F. Kennedy in 1953. When Senator Kennedy became President, Sorensen was appointed special counsel to the President. He served as policy adviser, legal counsel, and speech writer to President Kennedy and was deeply involved in such matters as the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights legislation, and the decision to go to the moon.

Since 1966 he has practiced international law at one of New York’s most prominent law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Now Senior Counsel, his practice focuses on international business and governmental transactions in all parts of the world.

He is the author of the 1965 international bestseller Kennedy, Why I Am A Democrat, and six other books on the presidency, politics or foreign policy, and numerous articles on those subjects in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and other publications. He has lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad to business, academic, military, political, religious, and other audiences. He has participated in nine of the last eleven Democratic Party National Conventions, and has served in a number of governmental, political, and civic posts.

Mr. Jack Valenti was born in Houston, Texas in 1921. At the age of 15, he was the youngest high school graduate in the city. As a young pilot in the Army Air Corps in World War II, Lieutenant Valenti flew 51 combat missions as the pilot-commander of a B-25 attack bomber with the 12th Air Force in Italy. He was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with four clusters, the Distinguished Unit Citation with one cluster, and the European Theater Ribbon with four battle stars. He has a B.A. from the University of Houston and graduated from Harvard with an M.B.A.

In 1952, he co-founded the advertising/political consulting agency of Weekley & Valenti. In 1955 he met the man who would have the largest impact on his life, the then Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson. Valenti’s agency was in charge of the press during the visit of President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson to Texas. Valenti was in the motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Within hours of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Valenti was on Air Force One flying back to Washington, the first newly hired special assistant to the new President.

He left the White House in 1966 to become the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, presiding over it during an age of unparalleled economic, artistic and technological achievement. One of Valenti’s notable accomplishments was the 1968 institution of the movie rating system, in which a film is given a G, PG, PG-13 or R rating based on its content. He resigned in 2004.

His books include The Bitter Taste of Glory, A Very Human President, and Speak up with Confidence. He is presently writing his memoirs.

Mr. Steve Bell served as a news correspondent for ABC News from 1967 to 1986. As a war correspondent in the early 1970s, he reported from Vietnam and Indo-China. He and his camera crew were captured by the Viet Cong and while briefly held at gunpoint, he managed to tape-record the incident. While covering the 10th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam in 1985, Bell filmed the first live satellite report from Vietnam.

He became the ABC Bureau Chief in Hong Kong in 1972 and reported from the People’s Republic of China. He also served as a White House correspondent and became familiar to millions of Americans as anchorman for ABC’s World News This Morning and news segments of Good Morning America with David Hartman.

He has received two national Emmy nominations, numerous local Emmy awards, an Overseas Press Club award and a Headliner’s Award for his reporting. He is Professor of Telecommunications at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Recently, he wrote and produced a Vietnam documentary for Public Television based on a visit with a group of Ball State faculty and students.

Ms. Frances Fitzgerald received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, which she wrote in 1972 at the age of 32. It was published to immediate and extraordinary praise, hailed for its “stunning clarity” by one reviewer and as “one of the best descriptions and analyses of Vietnam ever published in English” by another. The book was based on her own research and travels inside Vietnam~ into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks ~ and revealed the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. With a clarity and authority unrivaled at the time, Fire in the Lake argued that America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

Her other books include Cities on a Hill and Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.

Mr. Dan Rather was anchor and managing editor for the CBS Evening News for 24 years and is currently a correspondent for 60 Minutes. He was born in Wharton, Texas in 1931 and received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1953. Since the start of his career in 1950, Rather has been in the middle of the world’s defining moments. From Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, when he kept the American people informed of the details of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to Beijing, Bosnia, Haiti and Hong Kong decades later, he has covered most of the world’s major news stories. His reporting on the civil rights movement in the South; the White House; the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and Yugoslavia; and the quest for peace in South Africa and the Middle East has showcased his combination of street smarts and astute analysis. He has received virtually every honor in broadcast journalism, including numerous Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and citations from critical, scholarly, professional and charitable organizations.

He was regularly cited as “best anchor” in opinion surveys. During his 35 years with CBS News, Rather has held many prestigious positions, ranging from co-editor of 60 Minutes to anchor of CBS Reports and anchor of the weekend and weeknight editions of the CBS Evening News. He has served as CBS News bureau chief in London and Saigon and was the White House correspondent during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

He earned the title of “the hardest working man in broadcast journalism,” holding down the top job at three national news programs simultaneously: CBS Evening News, 48 Hours and 60 Minutes II. At the same time he has written a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and records a radio program, Dan Rather Reporting, heard on more than 300 radio stations across the country.

General Wesley K. Clark was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1944 and was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. He graduated valedictorian from the United States Military Academy in West Point in 1966 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a Masters Degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

He went to Vietnam in 1969, serving as the Assistant Staff Officer of the Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Infantry Division, eventually being promoted to Captain. The next year he was wounded and was awarded the Bronze and Silver Stars.

During thirty-four years of service in the United States Army, Wesley Clark rose to the rank of four-star general as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. His final military command was Operation Allied Force, NATO’s first major combat action to save over a million Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. After his retirement in 2000, he became an investment banker, author, commentator, and businessman. He was a Democratic candidate in the 2004 Presidential elections.

He is the author of Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of Combat and Winning Modern War: Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Senator Chuck Hagel, a fourth generation Nebraskan, was born in 1946. He is Nebraska’s Senior Senator, serving his second term. He serves on four committees: Foreign Relations; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Intelligence; and Rules. The Senator is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion Subcommittee and the Senate Banking Securities and Investment Subcommittee. Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the private sector as the president of McCarthy & Co., an investment banking firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, and served as Chairman of the Board of American Information Systems.

Senator Hagel served in Vietnam with his brother Tom in 1968. They served side by side as infantry squad leaders with the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry Division. Both were wounded. Chuck Hagel earned many military decorations and honors, including two Purple Hearts. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated him to serve as Deputy Administrator of the Veterans Administration. He was honored with The Vietnam Veterans of America Legislator of the Year Award and is co-chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Corporate Council.

Among some of the institutions for which Hagel serves as a Board or Advisory Committee member are the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, International Republican Institute, the German Marshall Fund’s Trade and Poverty Forum, the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, the Private Sector Council, the Ripon Society, the American Red Cross, Bread for the World, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2005, Hagel received the Omaha World-Herald’s “Midlander of the Year” Award.

Mr. Bob Herbert was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He received his B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York. He served his tour of duty in Korea during the Vietnam War in 1966.

He has been a New York Times Op-Ed columnist since 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining the Times, Mr. Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on The Today Show and NBC Nightly News. He had worked as a reporter and editor at the New York Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board.

In 1990, Mr. Herbert was a founding panelist of Sunday Edition, a weekly discussion program on WCBS-TV in New York, and the host of Hotline, a weekly issues program on New York public television. He began his career as a reporter with the Newark Star-Ledger in 1970 and became its night city editor in 1973.

Mr. Herbert has won numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing. He was chairman of the Pulitzer Prize jury for spot news reporting in 1993. A collection of his New York Times columns Promises Betrayed was published last year.

Ambassador Pete Peterson was born in 1935 in Nebraska. He was a United States Air Force pilot when he was sent to Vietnam in 1966. He was shot down after three months and remained a Prisoner of War for the next six and a half years. In 1997, President Clinton assigned him as the first Ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since the War. During his tenure (1997 to 2001), he achieved significant milestones in the process of normalizing relations between the United States and Vietnam, including progress in the resolution of MIA issues and a bilateral trade agreement which marked the full normalization process between the two countries.

Immediately prior to his diplomatic posting, Ambassador Peterson served three terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing the Second Congressional District of Florida, where he was a member of the House Appropriations Committee and deeply engaged in international relations, national defense, and health matters. Currently, he serves on various philanthropic and academic boards, is a Senior Director of Stonebridge International, LLC., and co-founder and President of Peterson International, Inc.

An edited transcript of the proceedings of the Vietnam and the Presidency conference is available on this website.
Photos are available at: http://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/events/vietnam/photos.html
Video is available from C-SPAN at http://www.c-spanstore.org/shop/