A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
Tuesday May 2, 5:30 pm
Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall
Princeton University
Professors Alvin S. Felzenberg and Robert P. George will discuss Felzenberg’s recent book on William F. Buckley Jr., a biography that sheds new light on Buckley’s role in national politics in the post-war era.
Alvin S. Felzenberg *75, *78 is Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as Director of Communications for the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress and, earlier, as principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. He served in two presidential administrations, held several high-level posts with the U.S. House of Representatives, and, in the 1980s, was New Jersey’s Assistant Secretary of State in the administration of Governor Thomas H. Kean. He has been a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and has taught at Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and George Washington Universities. He has appeared as a commentator on major public affairs television shows, including CNN’s “Crossfire,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” and multiple others. His writings have appeared in the Washington Post, Weekly Standard, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, and Christian Science Monitor. He has regularly contributed to National Review Online, US NEWS.com, and Politico. His most recent book is A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. (Yale University Press, 2017). His other writings include The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game (Basic Books, 2008), and Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9-11 Commission (Rutgers University Press, 2006). He received his MA and PhD in Politics from Princeton University.
Robert P. George is McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on the President’s Council on Bioethics, and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. His most recent book is Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (ISI Books, 2013). His scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and the Review of Politics. Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He has given honorific lectures at Harvard, Yale, University of St. Andrews, and Cornell University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and holds honorary doctorates of law, ethics, science, letters, divinity, humanities, law and moral values, civil law, humane letters, and juridical science. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degree of D.Phil. from Oxford University. In November of 2016 he received the degrees of B.C.L. and D.C.L. from Oxford.