Timothy Naftali
Senior Research Scholar in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs
Personal Details
Dr. Timothy Naftali, formerly a clinical professor of public service at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, clinical professor of history in NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and director of NYU’s undergraduate public policy program, joined Columbia in July 2023 as a Senior Research Scholar at SIPA. Naftali, whose book Khrushchev’s Cold War with Aleksandr Fursenko, won the Royal United Services Institute’s Duke of Westminster’s medal for military literature in 2007, is a pioneer in the study of modern international and espionage history and is a well-recognized presidential historian. After serving as the first director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs’ presidential recordings program. Naftali became the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, where he curated a nationally recognized nonpartisan permanent exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of records. Naftali is the author, co-author or editor of 8 books, including a biography of George Herbert Walker Bush and histories of US counterterrorism policy and of presidential impeachment. Naftali was an historical consultant to both the Nazi party War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group and to the 9/11 Commission. He is currently a member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, which provides oversight for the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Naftali, who is a CNN presidential historian, has appeared in several documentaries, most recently Prime Video’s “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes” and CNN’s “2010s,” and has also consulted on CNN’s “Tricky Dick” and Netflix’s “Designated Survivor.”
In The Media
Eight historians, including SIPA's Tim Naftali, evaluate Trump’s gold plaques for each president.
As its first federal director, Tim Naftali, now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, was responsible for transforming Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, including its Watergate exhibit, which contained false claims and had been put together by Nixon allies, into a place that told a more truthful story. “We had to create a different culture, a nonpartisan culture,” he told me. He faced intense pressure from the Richard Nixon Foundation, which saw the place more like a shrine, he said.
“The president has an outsized personality,” said Timothy Naftali, former director of Richard Nixon’s presidential library and professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “There’s a predictability to the way in which the president frames his actions — or any actions around any event associated with him — and that’s just part of who he is, and his makeup and his professional background.”
"When the president, in a tough midterm election environment, chooses loyalty to himself over loyalty to keeping a majority in Congress, it shouldn't be surprising that some elements of that majority, if from his own party, begin to test their own independence," said Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Tim Naftali noted that gathering the president, vice president, and speaker in the same space when the United States is at war with Iran—a country previously linked to plots against Trump and other U.S. officials—was ill-advised. “This is not the right time to have all hands on deck,” he said.