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
"Sometimes Bush sided with Baker, sometimes he sided with Scowcroft," said historian Timothy Naftali, who explored the declassified archives. "There was never an instance where Cheney had an outlying opinion and the president sided with Cheney."
“One of the dangers of Cheney’s theory of the presidency was that someone who didn’t care about the Constitutional balance of power would take advantage of those powers,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University, said Ronald Reagan's legacy is a problem for Trump because while Reagan believed in international alliances and free trade, Trump does not.
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University, speaks to the demolition of the White House's East Wing and the 123 years of American history it embodied.
Columbia's presidential historian analyzes the impact of domestic and international tensions on the American election race: "America has experienced authoritarian regimes before. But not a man like this in the White House since Andrew Jackson." And on the Middle East: "Trump has merit, but the political dividends will go to the Democrats."