On Tuesday, September 30, the Clements Center for National Security and The LBJ Library will host Philip Taubman and William Taubman for a talk of their newest book, McNamara at War: A New History. Join us in the Brown Room on the 10th floor of the LBJ Library from 12:15pm-1:30pm.
Philip Taubman is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His biography of George Shultz, In The Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz, was published in 2023 by Stanford University Press. Before joining CISAC in 2008, Mr. Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including United States diplomacy, and intelligence and defense policy and operations. At the Times, Taubman served as a Washington correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, deputy editorial page editor, Washington bureau chief and associate editor.
Before joining the New York Times, he worked as a correspondent for Time magazine and was sports editor of Esquire. He was a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, 1978-1982, and served as secretary of the Stanford Board, 2011-2018. He is author of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (Harper Collins, 2012) and Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Taubman was a history major at Stanford, Class of 1970, and served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily in 1969.
William Taubman, the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, is the co-author of the about-to-be published McNamara at War: A New History. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. He is also the author of Gorbachev: His Life and Times (2017) and of Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War, (1982) and co-author with his wife, retired Amherst College professor of Russian Jane Taubman, of Moscow Spring, (1988). Taubman was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2009 and chaired the Academic Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has received the Karel Kramar Medal of the Czech Republic and the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.