Timothy Naftali

A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Johns Hopkins (M.A. International Relations), Timothy Naftali received an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Harvard in 1993. In September 2017 Naftali became clinical associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences and a clinical associate professor of public service at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at NYU.

A CNN Presidential Historian since June 2016, Naftali is the author of the biography of George H. W. Bush in the American Presidents’ series, a study of the history of US Counterterrorism Policy over eight presidencies and a general editor of W. W. Norton’s 14-volume Presidential Recordings publications series. With Aleksandr Fursenko, he is also the co-author of two books on US-Soviet relations in the Cold War. Naftali is the contributor of a chapter on Richard Nixon to a new book on Presidential Impeachment and is currently completing a book about JFK in the White House.

Before joining the faculty at NYU, Naftali was the first director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where his duties included curating a new, nonpartisan Watergate gallery and interviewing over 100 former Nixon officials and others from the era for the library’s inaugural video oral history program. Between 1998-2006, he was the founding director of the presidential recordings program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, where he also taught in the history department and participated in the Miller Center’s George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton presidential oral history projects. The co-recipient (with Fursenko) of the 2007 Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature for Khrushchev’s Cold War, Naftali has served as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission and the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. From January 2014 through August 2015, Naftali was director of NYU’s Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and, until August 2016, co-director of the Center for the United States and the Cold War.