Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois

Richard Norton Smith is a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he appears regularly as part of the show’s round table of historians. Mr. Smith is currently at work on a life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, to be published in 2006, and based on extensive original research and interviews with Rockefeller associates.

His books include Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, and The Colonel: the Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, receiving the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School. Presidents have been the subjects of two other books: An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984) and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993).

Smith has been the chief executive at four presidential institutions: the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum (1987-1993), the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center (1990), the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (1993-1996), and the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library (1996-2000). In December of 2001, he left the Gerald R. Ford Foundation where he was the founding director to become the director of the new Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He has also assisted the Doles on their books, Unlimited Partners, Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House, and a sequel, Great Presidential Wit (2001).

photo credit: Hank Young/Young co. ©2002 Reeder & Co.