Marking the 30th anniversary of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, noted journalists and scholars, nearly all of whom have written books about American presidents, gather for three panel discussions on the shifting fortunes of presidential reputations. Panel one, 'The Press and the Presidency', includes Jack Beatty, a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly; Kathleen Dalton, an associate fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University; and presidential biographer and prize-winning journalist Tom Wicker. The panel is moderated by Ellen Hume, a former White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who now directs the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Beatty joined *The Atlantic Monthly* as a senior editor in September of 1983, having previously worked as a book reviewer at *Newsweek* and as the literary editor of *The New Republic*. In addition to editing many of *The Atlantic*'s major nonfiction pieces, Beatty is in charge of the book-review section, and he has contributed numerous articles to the magazine himself. Recent subjects have spanned the globe: NATO, the United States Navy, and the Irish Troubles among them. His 1993 contribution to *The Atlantic Monthly*'s Travel pages, "The Bounteous Berkshires," earned these words of praise from *The Washington Post*: "The best travel writers make you want to travel with them. I, for instance, would like to travel somewhere with Jack Beatty, having read his superb account of a cultural journey to the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts." Beatty is also the author of *The World According to Peter Drucker*, published in 1998 by The Free Press and called "a fine intellectual portrait" by Michael Lewis in the *New York Times* Book Review. Born, raised, and educated in Boston, Beatty wrote a best-selling biography of James Michael Curley, the Massachusetts congressman and governor and Boston mayor, which Addison-Wesley published in 1992.
Kathleen Dalton is Cecil F.P. Bancroft Instructor of History at Phillips Academy Andover and an external fellow of Boston University's International History Institute. Author of *Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (2002)* and *A Portrait of a School: Coeducation at Andover (1986)*, she has spoken widely about Theodore Roosevelt, including appearances on *C-SPAN's Book TV, the History Channel, the Arts and Entertainment Channel*, and public television; her writing has appeared in numerous newspapers. She is currently working on her next book, *The White Lilies and the Iron Boot*; a story of four friends (including Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt) and their attempts to shape U.S. foreign relations during a dangerous time.
Ellen Hume is an Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University in Budapest. She was also the Founding Editor and Publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire. Hume is an experienced journalist, teacher, speaker, administrator, conference director and television commentator. As the founding Executive Director of PBS's Democracy Project, from 1996 to 1998, she developed special news programs that encouraged citizen involvement in public affairs. She oversaw PBS's 1996 and 1998 election coverage, creating PBS Debate Night, a nationally televised Congressional leadership debate, as well as local candidate debates on PBS stations across the country. Hume has more than 30 years of experience as a reporter and analyst for US newspapers, magazines and television. She was a White House and political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal from 1983 to 1988, and a Washington based national reporter with The Los Angeles Times from 1977 to 1983.