The retreat opened on Sunday, October 19, with before-dinner remarks by Fred Barnes, cofounder and executive editor of the Weekly Standard.

David Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University, discussed the question “Can the United States Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?” before dinner on Monday night.

Richard Epstein, Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at Hoover and University of Chicago Law School professor, gave a presentation titled “Weathering the Financial Storm on Wall Street and Main Street.”

Hoover senior fellow Niall Ferguson, also a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School gave a presentation titled “Political and Geopolitical Consequences of the Credit Crunch.”

Fouad Ajami’s presentation was “In the Shadow of Iraq: A Reading of the Arabs.” Ajami is a professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Amy Zegart, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles discussed the failures of the intelligence community in her presentation “Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11.”

In “Complements of the Hoover Archives,” Richard Sousa, senior associate director at Hoover and director of the library and archives, reviewed the history of the archives and the notable collections that are included in it, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Commonwealth Club, and Firing Line.

In his presentation “The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game,” Alvin Felzenberg, a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed the findings from his book by the same name.

Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, spoke on “Obama, Palin, and the Culture Wars” in his presentation.

The upcoming election was the focus of the presentation by Hoover senior fellow Morris Fiorina and Daron Shaw, associate professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas, Austin.