Democracy is about having choices — and authoritarianism is about not having them, says lawyer and writer Ian Bassin. Detailing the seven steps of the authoritarian playbook, he invites us all to put aside our differences and rethink our...

Working in the White House in the 1840s may have been more hazardous than we thought.

On our bookshelf tonight, NewsHour's old friend and former longtime media

correspondent Terence Smith's memoir: "Four Wars, Five Presiden
ts: A
Reporter's Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White Hou
se." Smith
spoke...

Jim Lehrer discusses the significance of Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis with the presidential historians and Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. (screening copy available upon request)

Peter Wehner served in three Republican White Houses. Now, he's written a book about the current state of national political discourse. In “The Death of Politics,” Wehner analyzes the tone and rhetoric used by President Trump, and how...

The Common Ground Between Law Enforcement And Activists’ Call To ‘Defund The Police’

In a new book, NPR’s Steve Inskeep has chronicled the little-known story of how the illegitimate son of an immigrant rose to become the Republican Party’s first presidential nominee in 1856 -- with a lot of help from his wife. Lisa...

Book: Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964

Governing in a crisis like the novel coronavirus pandemic can define a presidency. What lessons does history have to offer as a guide? Judy Woodruff reports and talks to former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was President Obama’s chief...

Like many presidents before him, President Donald Trump spent part of the summer away from the White House, taking a 17-day Òworking vacationÓ at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. President Abraham Lincoln could relate. To get...

President Trump's nomination of federal judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 launched a bitter partisan fight that grew even more polarized when Christine Blasey Ford said Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high...

Book:The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

Former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker says he felt a discussion of investigations was "inappropriate" in a July meeting between Ukrainian and U.S. officials at the White House.

Former Presidents Ford and Carter talk about their advice to President-elect George H.W. Bush, particularly on the need to focus his attention on the federal deficit.

Journalist and historian Craig Fehrman has written a book called “Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote.” He sits down with John Yang to discuss the long history of presidential writing, the...

Book: Beyond the White House

Why Jimmy Carter May Be The Most Misunderstood President In American History

Why are we so deadlocked on climate, and what would it take to overcome the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress? Policy entrepreneur TED Halstead proposes a transformative solution based on the conservative principles of free...

This week Craig Benzine talks about how the president gets things done. Filling the role of the executive branch is a pretty big job - much too big for just one person. It's so big that the president employs an entire federal...

Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement: they've created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science.

With his art, photographer Platon seeks to strip away assumptions and leave viewers with a window into his subject's character, filling our eyes with wonder and curiosity. Sharing extraordinary stories of what it's like to photograph...

As the saying goes, less is more. The same goes for words. Listen as Politico and Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei shares what he's learned leading two media companies -- and how to radically rethink the way you write to keep people's...

What can governments learn from the open-data revolution? In this stirring talk, Beth Noveck, the former deputy CTO at the White House, shares a vision of practical openness -- connecting bureaucracies to citizens, sharing data, creating...

From taking your files ransom to foiling uranium enrichment, here are five more computer viruses that you really want to avoid.