Political Icons: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2017 Leon Levy Biography Conference - Political Icons: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Wednesday, March 8, 2017
1:30 p.m.–8:00 p.m.
Elebash Recital Hall


1:30 p.m.–1:45 p.m.
Introductory Remarks

1:45 p.m.–3:00 p.m.
Liberal Icons
David Nasaw (award-winning biographer of Joseph Kennedy, Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst), with Blanche Wiesen Cook (author of the three-volume biography, Eleanor Roosevelt), Patricia Bell-Scott (The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice), and David Levering-Lewis (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois).

3:15 p.m.–4:30 p.m.
Daniel Oppenheimer with Kai Bird
Daniel Oppenheimer (Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century) discusses the strange political odysseys of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens.

4:45 p.m.–6:00 p.m.
Presidential Transitions
Meg Jacobs (Research Scholar, Princeton University, and author of Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s), with Robert Dallek (author of presidential biographies of FDR, JFK, LBJ and Nixon), John Farrell (Richard Nixon: The Life), and Michael Tomasky (Bill Clinton).

6:30 p.m.–7:45 p.m.
Israel and Palestine through Memoir & Biography
Sari Nusseibeh (Once upon a Country: A Palestinian Life and The Story of Reason in Islam) and Dan Ephron (Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel) speak with Kai Bird (Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age between the Arabs and Israelis).