Dole Institute director announces speakers in Presidential Lecture Series

EDITORS' NOTE: This release is embargoed until noon today.

LAWRENCE -- Richard Norton Smith, director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, today announced that the center will inaugurate its Presidential Lecture Series this fall in Lawrence with three nationally known historians.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, biographer, historian and former assistant to Lyndon Johnson, will kick off the series on Nov. 3. Michael Beschloss is to follow on Nov. 10. Beschloss, also a historian and author, served as director of the Harry S Truman Centennial Commission. David McCullough, a renowned historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S Truman, will speak Nov. 17.

The Presidential Lecture Series will be free and open to the public.

Smith said he hoped public participation would become a hallmark of the Dole Institute as conferences, lectures and debates sought to engage the public in discussion of public policy. At the same time, he said, the series will expose policy makers to "the real America."

Smith said the institute had plans to collect oral history about the senator through recorded interviews with hundreds of Dole's friends and associates.

Dole and his wife, Elizabeth, broke ground on the Dole Institute building last October. Upon completion, the institute will have a 28,000-square-foot home located on KU's West Campus. It will house Dole's personal and public archives.The building is scheduled to be dedicated on July 22, 2003, Dole's 80th birthday.

The Dole Institute, established at KU in 1997 to honor the former Kansas senator and presidential nominee, is designed to foster new thinking on major policy issues and encourage student participation and citizen involvement in public service.

Goodwin initially gained acclaim for her first book, "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream," which a New York Times reviewer called "the most penetrating biography" he had ever read. In 1995 Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, "No Ordinary Time." She also wrote "The Fitzgeralds & the Kennedys," which was made into a six-hour miniseries on ABC. Her husband, Richard Goodwin, was the investigator who uncovered the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, dramatized in the movie "Quiz Show."

Beschloss is a specialist in the American presidency and has written extensively about presidents at times of crisis. He recently published "Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965," the second volume of a projected trilogy about President Johnson. This volume and the first book, "Taking Charge," study the Johnson presidency through tapes of LBJ's White House telephone conversations. Beschloss' other books include "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963" and "Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance."

McCullough wrote the highly acclaimed presidential biography "Truman," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His newest biography, "John Adams," has more than a million copies in print. His other historical works include "The Johnstown Flood" (1968); "Mornings on Horseback" (1981), about the young Theodore Roosevelt; and "Brave Companions" (1992), essays on heroic figures past and present. McCullough is the host of PBS' "The American Experience" and narrated Ken Burns' "The Civil War" and other PBS programs.