The miller center at thirty years.(Miller Center of Public Affairs )(Occupation overview)

The Miller Center of Public Affairs was established in 1975 at the University of Virginia through a generous gift by Burkett Miller, a Tennessee philanthropist and businessman. Miller envisioned a nonpartisan institution focused on the problems and challenges of the American presidency and the executive branch. Thirty years later, the Miller Center is widely recognized as a leading national institution for basic research on the American presidency. Unique in the United States, the Miller Center is neither a policy think tank nor a public policy school. Through its four core programs and presidential library, the Center gathers new knowledge about the workings of our government, shares that knowledge in innovative ways, and contributes to the public debate on critical issues of governance.

MILLER CENTER PROGRAMS

The Presidential Recordings Program (PRP)

The Presidential Recordings Program was established by the Miller Center in 1998 to make the secret White House recordings of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon accessible through transcripts and historical research. From 1940 to 1973, these six presidents recorded hundreds of their most significant meetings and telephone calls. The tapes chronicle the deliberation and decision making process of these presidents during such critical events as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Mississippi and Birmingham civil rights crises, the Vietnam War, and the opening to China. The tapes also offer direct knowledge of how modern U.S. presidents exercise leadership in times of peace and war. These recordings constitute an extremely rich historical resource, but one that cannot be unlocked without considerable time and experience in working with the tapes. Once unlocked, the tapes can, do, and will make significant contributions to our understanding of recent political history and how the U.S. government works. To that end, the PRP brings together historians, journalists, and a talented team of student interns to work with these materials to transcribe, annotate, interpret, and share them.

The Miller Center is the only institution that has dedicated a team of scholars solely to the work of making this unique historical record accessible to scholars and to the public. In 2001 W.W. Norton and Company published the first three volumes of the Kennedy series, The Presidential Recordings: …