Lessons from the Founding: The 2026 George Washington Symposium

Rick Atkinson

Atkinson is a historian and the author, most recently, of The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, the second volume of a projected trilogy about the American Revolution. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and reviewer Amy S. Greenberg wrote in the Times’ review, “There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson.”

The first volume, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, spent nearly three months on the Times bestseller list in 2019. Reviewer Joseph J. Ellis wrote in the Times Book Review, “To say that Atkinson can tell a story is like saying Sinatra can sing.” Writing in the Washington Post, columnist George Will called Atkinson “the nation’s finest military historian, living or dead.”

Atkinson is also the author of six other works of narrative history, including The Long Gray Line and the Liberation Trilogy about the American role during World War II in the Mediterranean and Western European theaters. His numerous awards include Pulitzer Prizes for history and journalism. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Peter Baker

Baker is the Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times as well as a political analyst for MS NOW and a frequent panelist on PBS’s Washington Week. He is covering his sixth presidency for The Times and The Washington Post dating back to 1996.

In between stints at the White House, Baker spent four years as Moscow Co-Bureau Chief for The Post along with his wife, Susan Glasser, chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin and the rollback of Russian democracy. He also reported from Afghanistan and Iraq during the opening stages of the U.S. wars there. He served briefly as Jerusalem Bureau Chief for The Times, where he has worked for the past 18 years.

Baker is the author or co-author of seven books on national and international affairs, most recently The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, and The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, both with Glasser and both New York Times bestsellers. His book, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, was named one of the five Best Nonfiction Books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. 

Leon E. Panetta

Panetta was unanimously confirmed in 2011 by the U.S. Senate as the twenty-third Secretary of Defense, where he established a new defense strategy and expanded service opportunities for women and others regardless of race, creed, color or gender. As Director of the CIA, he led the operation that brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

Secretary Panetta began his public service career in 1964 as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, receiving the Army Commendation Medal, and then served as a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Tom Kuchel. In 1969, he was appointed Director of the Office for Civil Rights, where he was responsible for enforcing equal education laws.

Elected to Congress in 1976, he represented the California Central Coast for sixteen years. In 1993, he was sworn in as Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for the Clinton administration and later was appointed White House chief of staff.

In 1997, Secretary Panetta returned to Monterey to establish The Panetta Institute for Public Policy, a non-partisan study center that seeks to inspire men and women to lives of public service. He chronicles his life in his best-selling memoir Worthy Fights, published in 2014.

General Stanley McChrystal

McChrystal is a retired United States Army general and is the former commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture.

In 2013, he published his bestselling memoir, My Share of the Task; followed by Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (2015); and On Character, an instant New York Times bestseller. He previously served as a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he also taught a course on Leadership. 

A passionate advocate for national service and veterans' issues, he chaired the board of the Service Year Alliance, advocating for a future in which a year of full-time service—a service year—is a common expectation and opportunity for all young Americans.

McChrystal is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Naval War College. He also completed year-long fellowships at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lamar Alexander

Alexander has long been known as one of America’s most principled and effective statesmen. As US Senator, he shepherded major laws that today govern K–12 education, medical innovation, and maintenance of our national parks. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “For eighteen years, there was Lamar Alexander, and there was the rest of us. He was hands-down one of the most brilliant, most thoughtful, and most effective legislators any of us have ever seen.” 

As governor, Alexander brought the auto industry to Tennessee and made it the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well. He was chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the nation’s governors, and of President Reagan’s “Commission on Americans Outdoors.” He served as US Education Secretary and as a university president. 

He graduated from Vanderbilt University and New York University Law School. A seventh generation Tennessean, Alexander lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains near Maryville where he grew up. 

Susan Glasser

Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she is author of the weekly “Letter from Trump’s Washington” and co-host of the popular Political Scene Podcast. Glasser previously served as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post.

She was editor of POLITICO, guiding a news operation of 200 journalists in the momentous 2016 election cycle, and founded POLITICO Magazine. Before that, she was editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, relaunching its web site as a daily publication and winning multiple National Magazine Awards while its online readership grew tenfold.

She spent 10 years at The Post where she served as Assistant Managing Editor for National News, editor of the Outlook section and Moscow Co-Bureau Chief. Glasser worked for eight years at Roll Call, the preeminent newspaper covering Congress, where she rose from intern to its top editor.

Glasser is co-author of three books with her husband Peter Baker, most recently The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, and The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, both New York Times bestsellers. She is a frequent panelist on PBS’s Washington Week as well as other news shows.

Steve Inskeep

Inskeep is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as the morning news podcast Up First.

His first assignment at NPR was the 1996 presidential primary. He went on to cover the Pentagon, the Senate, and the 2000 presidential campaign. After September 11, he covered the war in Afghanistan, turmoil in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq. In 2003, he received a National Headliner Award for investigating a military raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. He has twice been part of NPR News teams awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for coverage of Iraq.

Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, a 2011 book on one of the world's great megacities. He is also author of Jacksonland, a history of President Andrew Jackson's long-running conflict with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of Indians from the eastern United States in the 1830s.

He has been a guest on numerous TV programs including ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, CNN's Inside Politics and the PBS Newshour. He has written for publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.

Robert Costa

Costa is a national correspondent for “CBS News Sunday Morning” and chief Washington analyst for CBS News. Prior to joining CBS News, Costa was a longtime reporter at The Washington Post and moderator of “Washington Week” on PBS. He and Bob Woodward co-wrote “Peril,”, a #1 New York Times best-seller.

Costa and colleagues at "Sunday Morning" won an Emmy Award in 2023 for Outstanding Recorded News Program.

Costa holds a bachelor's degree with honors from the University of Notre Dame, where he is a former trustee, and a master's degree in politics from the University of Cambridge. Since 2022, Costa has served as a scholar at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

Jeffrey Rosen

Jeffrey Rosen is the CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for the New Yorker.

Rosen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Pursuit of Happiness and Conversations with RBG. His new book is The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America.

Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and Yale Law School. He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Law Institute. In 2024, the French government recognized him as a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Elie Honig

Honig is CNN's Senior Legal Analyst. He previously worked for 14 years as a federal and state prosecutor. He is the national bestselling author of three books for HarperCollins, most recently When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump (2025). 

In 2022, he was nominated for a national Emmy Award for Outstanding News Analysis: Editorial and Opinion. Honig writes a weekly column for New York Magazine and Cafe.com; hosts a true crime podcast about the mafia, “Up Against the Mob;” and guest hosts on SiriusXM. 

Honig graduated from Rutgers University (where he now teaches) in 1997 and Harvard Law School in 2000.

Judge J. Michael Luttig

Judge Luttig served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006. He is currently counselor and special advisor to the Coca-Cola Company and its board of directors. Prior to joining Coca-Cola, he was counselor and senior advisor to the Boeing Company CEO and board of directors. He was executive vice president and general counsel of Boeing from 2006 to 2020. 

Before he was appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, he served as assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice and counselor to the attorney general of the United States. He was assistant counsel to the president at the White House from 1981 to 1982 under President Ronald Reagan. From 1982 to 1983, he was a law clerk to then-Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1983 to 1985, he served as a law clerk and then special assistant to the chief justice of the United States.

Judge Luttig earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington and Lee University and his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Ali Vitali

Ali Vitali is the host of MS NOW's Way Too Early with Ali Vitali, airing every weekday at 5 a.m. ET. She is also MS NOW's Senior Capitol Hill Reporter based in Washington, D.C. 

Vitali has been at the forefront of covering national politics for the last decade – from the halls of Congress to the Trump and Biden White Houses, and the pivotal 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections. She has also been on the campaign trail for every presidential and midterm election since 2016. 

In 2022, Vitali authored Electable: Why America Hasn't Put A Woman In the White House…Yet, a book detailing her experiences as a "Road Warrior" and investigating the double standards placed on female presidential candidates. She is a proud graduate of Tulane University.

Michelle Howard

Howard was the first woman to achieve the rank of four-star admiral and the first women to be appointed to the position of Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, which is the second highest position in the Navy. She was also the first African American woman to reach the rank of three-star and four stars in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces and the first African American woman to command a ship in the Navy.

Admiral Howard was a former visiting professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, from 2018 to 2020, where she focused on the cyber domain and associated issues in strategy and policy.

Admiral Howard led Sailors and Marines multiple times in her career as the commander of a ship, an expeditionary task force and a naval theatre. This culminated in her final post as Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and U.S. Naval Forces Africa, in which she simultaneously led NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Naples with oversight of missions from the Western Balkans to Iraq.

Admiral Howard is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. 

Evan Thomas

Thomas is the author of eleven books: The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), The Man to See, The Very Best Men, Robert Kennedy, The War Lovers, Ike’s Bluff, Being Nixon, Road to Surrender, and New York Times bestsellers John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, and First: Sandra Day O’Connor. 

For over 30 years, he was a writer and editor at Time and Newsweek magazines, including 10 years as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, including Morning Joe, CBS Morning News and Fresh Air. 

Thomas taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton where, from 2007-2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism. His twelfth book, The Hour Strikes, written with his wife, Oscie Thomas, will be published in December 2026.

Tom Nichols

Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a contributor to the Atlantic Daily newsletter. He is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years, and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School. 

He has served as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts House and the U.S. Senate. He writes about international security, nuclear weapons, Russia, and the challenges to democracy in the United States and around the world—along with occasional contrarian views on popular culture. 

His books include The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion.

Yuval Levin

Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and the editor of National Affairs. He is a contributing editor to National Review, and his essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Atlantic, and many others. 

He is the author, most recently, of American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress. 

He served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Joshua Bolten

Joshua Bolten is CEO of Business Roundtable, an association of more than 200 CEOs of America’s leading companies.

Bolten’s twenty years of government service includes eight years in the White House under President George W. Bush as Chief of Staff (2006-09), Director of the Office of Management & Budget (2003-06), and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy (2001-03). For the preceding two years, he was Policy Director of the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. Bolten’s previous private sector experience includes work at Goldman Sachs in London and O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, DC.

Bolten received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1976 and his law degree from Stanford in 1980. He is a member of the boards of Emerson Electric Co., the Aspen Institute, the ONE Campaign, and Princeton University.

Mark K. Updegrove

Mark K. Updegrove is the chairman and CEO of the LBJ Foundation and Presidential Historian for ABC News. From 2009 to 2017, he served as director of the LBJ Presidential Library. 

He is the author of six books on the presidency, including his latest, "Make Your Mark: Lessons in Character from Seven Presidents,” and he is the host of the national PBS series “Live from the LBJ Library with Mark Updegrove.” 

Updegrove has conducted exclusive interviews with seven U.S. presidents. Earlier in his career, he was publisher of Newsweek and president of TIME Magazine’s Canadian edition. 

John Bridgeland

Bridgeland is Founder & CEO of More Perfect, an alliance of all 44 Presidential Centers (from Mount Vernon through the Obama Foundation), National Archives Foundation, and more than 100 organizations to protect and renew American democracy by advancing five foundational Democracy Goals, advancing initiatives in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, and developing civic moonshots that bring Americans together to solve public problems.

He was appointed by President Obama to serve on the White House Council of Community Solutions and by President George W. Bush as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Assistant to the President, and first Director of the USA Freedom Corps after 9/11. He is the author of the book, Heart of the Nation: Volunteering and America's Civic Spirit.

Melody Barnes

Barnes is the founding executive director of the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, where she leads an action-oriented path to realizing the promise of democracy in both principle and practice.

She served as assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Obama. Previously, she was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. She began her career in law as an associate at Shearman & Sterling in New York.

She is also the W.L. Lyons Brown Family Director for Policy and Public Engagement in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ Democracy Initiative, a professor of practice at UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, and a distinguished fellow at UVA’s School of Law. She is also co-founder of the domestic policy strategy firm MB2 Solutions.

Barnes is an inaugural recipient of the 2024–25 Chautauqua Perry Fellowship in Democracy, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the boards of several corporate, nonprofit, and philanthropic organizations.

Frank Cogliano

Cogliano is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. A specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States, he is the author or editor of twelve books. In April 2026 the University of Virginia Press published The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-four Historians Reflect on the Founding which he edited.

In June he and Peter S. Onuf will publish Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours with Norton/Liveright. His 2024 book: Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic (Harvard University Press) was a finalist for the 2025 George Washington Prize. 

Along with Patrick Griffin, Christa Dierksheide and Eliga Gould he edits the Revolutionary Age series for the University of Virginia Press. He co-hosts the American history podcast The Whiskey Rebellion and makes regular media appearances, commenting on U.S. history, politics and international relations, for the BBC and other outlets. 

John Fea

John Fea taught U.S. history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, PA for over two decades. He is currently Senior Fellow at The Lumen Center for the Study of Christian and Culture in Madison, WI. 

He is the author or editor of six books, and his work has appeared at The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Sojourners, Commonweal, Christianity Today, and other venues. He blogs daily at “The Way of Improvement Leads Home.”

Eliot A. Cohen

Cohen is the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught for 34 years and served as dean of the School of Advanced International Studies. 

In addition to serving in the Department of Defense’s Policy Planning Staff, he was Counselor of the Department of State in 2007-2009. He is the author of The Hollow Crown (2023), The Big Stick (2017), Conquered into Liberty (2011), and Supreme Command (2002) among other books and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. 

His next book, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2026.

Susan Swain

Swain spent four decades in leadership positions at C-SPAN, from which she retired as president and co-CEO in January 2025. 

In addition to the network's signature coverage of Congress and national politics, she nurtured its coverage of nonfiction books and American history and launched its educational outreach. She helped lead the network into the digital age, oversaw its expansion into audio and streaming platforms and fostered the use of its vast archival collection. 

Susan was also a principal on-camera interviewer for the network, with more than 5300 interviews posted in C-SPAN's archives.  She has served as a corporate director and continues to volunteer for nonprofit organizations and their boards. 

Ty Seidule

Seidule is the David H. and Ann L. Hinchcliff Professor of History and Executive Director of the Common Ground program at Hamilton College. He’s a Professor Emeritus of History at West Point and served in the US Army for 36 years, retiring as a Brigadier General. 

Seidule served as the vice chair of the Congressional Naming Commission tasked with renaming or removing Department of Defense assets that honored Confederates. His latest book is A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases. Ty’s 2021 book Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause made NPR and Forbes “best books of the year” lists. 

He has written or edited six other books, four of which won writing prizes. His short video, "Was the Civil War About Slavery?" has 35 million views on social media.

Christopher Liddell

Liddell served all four years as Assistant to the President in the first Trump administration. He worked as White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Director of Strategic Initiatives and member of the American Technology Council.  He is the author of Year Zero, which outlines a strategic approach to planning and building a significantly more effective White House.

He has thirty years of corporate experience, including as Chief Financial Officer at both Microsoft and International Paper, overseeing global finance operations. He was also Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer at General Motors, where he oversaw the company's historic public offering in 2010. He is currently a Director of Anthropic PBC and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

He serves as Chairman of New Zealand's largest environmental foundation and has also sat on several non-profit boards, including the New Zealand Rugby Union. He is currently a Director of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Chris is a dual citizen of the United States and New Zealand. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Auckland and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He recently completed a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School and is studying for a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford.

Mona Charen

Charen is a syndicated columnist and author, Policy Editor of The Bulwark, and host of the weekly podcast The Mona Charen Show. She is a regular commentator on MS Now and the BBC.

A graduate of Columbia University and the George Washington University law school, she began her career at National Review magazine.

Charen served as Nancy Reagan’s speechwriter and later as Associate Director of the Office of Public Liaison. Later in her White House career, she worked in the Public Affairs office helping to craft President Reagan’s communications strategy.

In 1986, she joined the presidential campaign of then-Congressman Jack Kemp.

Charen launched her syndicated column in 1987. It is featured in more than 60 newspapers and websites. She spent 6 years as a regular commentator on CNN’s Capital Gang and Capital Gang Sunday has served as a judge of the Pulitzer Prizes. She is the author of four books: Useful Idiots (2003); Do-Gooders (2005), Sex Matters (2018) and Hard Right (2023).

In 2010, she received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism.

Bob Crawford

Bob Crawford is the bassist for the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers, and creator of the iHeart Curiosity podcast series, Founding Son: John Quincy’s America and The SiriusXM Volume Channel Docuseries Concerts of Change: The Soundtrack of Human Rights. He’s also co-host of the Road to Now history podcast. However, Bob does not just play a historian—in 2020 he earned a master’s degree in
history from Arizona State University. More important than his passion for music and history is his dedication to raising awareness about pediatric cancer. Bob and his wife, Melanie, are co-managing partners for The Press On Fund, an organization that seeks to find less toxic treatments for childhood cancer. Bob is periodically a speaker on behalf of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. It’s a personal cause, as Bob’s daughter Hallie is a three-time cancer survivor.

Layla Zaidane

Zaidane is the President and CEO of Future Caucus, the largest nonpartisan organization of young lawmakers in the U.S., which equips over 1,800 Millennial and Gen Z elected leaders to scale a healthy culture of democracy. She is a nationally recognized youth engagement expert and has been featured in Forbes, Teen Vogue, The New York Times, and more. 

Zaidane previously served as the Managing Director for Generation Progress, where she led key youth advocacy campaigns. She holds a BSFS in international politics from Georgetown University and is an Aspen Civil Society Fellow in the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She is a Fellow of the Civil Society Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. In 2025, she was named to the TIME100 NEXT list and was a recipient of the McNulty Prize