MONTEREY — Chris Whipple, who has been in the news after authoring a controversial story that extensively interviewed Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, will be featured on a panel of journalists and historians in the first installment of the Leon Panetta Lecture Series on March 2.
Former Secretary of Defense Panetta will lead the panel on a discussion entitled “The lessons of history – Do Americans still believe in the Constitution and the values of our democracy?” The panel will also include historians Douglas Brinkley and Lindsay Chervinsky, as well as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
“Vital tenants of our democracy are being tested,” said Panetta in a press release. “I’ll speak with two presidential historians and award-winning journalists and White House observers to determine if there are lessons from the past that we can bring to the present fight.”
The annual series, now in its 29th year, is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with four lectures exploring the question: “What will be its legacy in the 21st century?”
The lectures will be at 7 p.m. on March 2, April 20, May 11 and June 1 at the Monterey Conference Center. Panetta Lecture Series subscriptions include tickets to all four live events and are available for $400. Individual tickets sell for $100. To order a subscription or individual ticket, call the Panetta Institute at (831) 582-4200 to pay with a credit card.
Whipple is a former producer for CBS News “60 Minutes” and the author of several books on the presidency and the White House, including “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” and “The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future.”
But Whipple’s most discussed work recently was his Vanity Fair article in December on the inner-workings of the Trump administration. In it, he talked extensively with Wiles, who was also Trump’s campaign manager, igniting a backlash from many top Republican officials.
Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, as well as a CNN Presidential Historian and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency, political culture and the government. She is the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She is the author of the
“The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.”
Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001 and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, have written several best-selling books.
