Presidential Misconduct:

The Long View

A Panel Discussion Featuring

James M. Banner Jr., Eric Alterman, Hendrik Hertzberg and T.J. Jackson Lears

Moderated by:

Karen J. Greenberg

Monday, November 18, 2019 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His latest book is Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie and Why Trump is Different and is now scheduled to be published by Basic in June. He is also the “Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, and at the World Policy Institute in New York, as well as former columnist for The Daily Beast, The Forward, Moment, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the Sunday Express (London), etc. Alterman is the author of 10 books, including the national bestseller What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. A winner of the George Orwell Prize, the Stephen Crane Literary Award, and the Mirror Award for media criticism, he has previously taught at Columbia and NYU and has been a Hoover Institution Media Fellow at Stanford University.

James M. Banner Jr. is an independent historian in Washington, D.C. The founding director of the History News Service as well as a cofounder of the National History Center, he is now a visiting scholar in the history department of George Washington University. Banner is a coeditor of Becoming Historians (2009), the author of Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (2012), and, most recently, the editor of Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (2019). His play, "Good and Faithful Servants," adapted from the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson, is under development, and he is completing a book about revisionist history, tentatively entitled "Battles over the Past."

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He originally joined the magazine as a reporter in 1969, after active duty in the U.S. Navy. He left in 1977 for Washington and the White House, where he was a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. From 1981 through 1991, he was associated with The New Republic, first as its editor, then as a political correspondent, and then as editor again. In 1992, he returned to The New Yorker, initially as executive editor. Since 2003, his Comment essays in The Talk of the Town have six times been finalists for the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, which he won in 2006. In 2009, Forbes.com put him at No. 17 on its list of “The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media.” He has also been a fellow of two institutes at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: the Institute of Politics and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. He is the author of “Politics: Observations & Arguments,” “¡Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era,” and “One Million.”

T.J. Jackson Lears is a Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and Editor in Chief of Raritan: a Quarterly Review. He is the author of many books, most notably No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 and Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 1995. He has also co-edited two collections of essays, The Culture of Consumption and The Power of Culture. Lears has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Winterthur Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University. In 2003 he received the Public Humanities Award (for “making ideas current”) from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.