Luke Nichter

Expertise

• U.S. Presidential History
• U.S. Political History
• Applied History
• Cold War History
• 1960s
• 1970s
• Lyndon Johnson
• Richard Nixon

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  Luke Nichter

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  Short Bio

  Luke A. Nichter is the James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and US political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the “long 1960s” from John F. Kennedy through Watergate—using consequential moments from recent history to better understand contemporary politics.

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  Mid-Length Bio

  Luke A. Nichter is the James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and US political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the “long 1960s” from John F. Kennedy through Watergate—using consequential moments from recent history to better understand contemporary politics.

  Nichter is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of numerous books, including The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale University Press, 2023), awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and chosen a Best Book by The Wall Street Journal; The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2020), awarded an NEH Public Scholar Grant; and Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is working on an edited volume of Richard Nixon’s correspondence and a book tentatively titled LBJ: The White House Years of Lyndon Johnson.

  He is a noted expert on the secret White House recordings of Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon and wrote a history of their taping systems commissioned by the White House Historical Association. His website, nixontapes.org, featured by CBS Sunday Morning, was the basis for The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), co-edited with Douglas Brinkley, along with sequel The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). The volumes won the Link-Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and are the most cited on the Nixon presidency.

  Nichter is a former founding executive producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, launched in 2011 in 41 million homes. His effort to file over three thousand Freedom of Information Act  requests to open historically important records to public access was endorsed by the American Historical Association. In 2020, the White House appointed him to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which was created in 1966 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In 2022, he was appointed by the Archivist of the United States to serve on the federal government’s FOIA Advisory Committee. In 2024, the Orange County Business Journal named him one of the Top 500 most influential people in Orange County, California.

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