Timothy Naftali

Timothy Naftali Speaker Biography

Timothy Naftali is an associate clinical professor of history and public service at NYU. He is a CNN presidential historian and a graduate of Yale with a doctorate in history from Harvard.

Naftali and Russian academic Aleksandr Fursenko wrote the path-breaking One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964 and Khrushchev’s Cold War, the latter winning the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature in 2007 and inclusion on Foreign Affairs’ 2014 list of the ten best books on the Cold War. As a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, Naftali wrote a history of US counterterrorism, later published as Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism. He has also written George H. W. Bush, on the Nation’s 41st president.

Naftali came to NYU after serving as the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he drew positive national attention for curating its Watergate Gallery. Naftali, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Slate and Foreign Affairs, is also seen regularly in television documentaries. Most recently, he was featured in CNN’s The Seventies, The Eighties and Race for the White House, and in the PBS documentaries, Dick Cavett’s Watergate, Dick Cavett’s Vietnam and The Bomb.