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Richard Norton Smith Dole Institute director

Richard Norton Smith is a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-Span, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he appears regularly as part of the show's round table of historians. Born in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1953, Smith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1975 with a degree in government. Following graduation he worked as a White House intern and as a free lance writer for The Washington Post. In 1977, Mr. Smith became a speech writer for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke.Two years later he went to work for Senator Bob Dole, with whom he has been closely associated ever since. He collaborated with the Doles on their joint autobiography, Unlimited Partners (1988; revised 1996). More recently he assisted Senator Dole on his 1998 book of political humor, Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House, and a sequel, Great Presidential Wit, published early in 2001.

Perhaps best-known as a historian and biographer, Mr. Smith is currently at work on a life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, to be published in 2006, and based on extensive original research and interviews with Rockefeller associates. Smith's first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984), The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986) and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993). In June 1997, Houghton Mifflin published Mr. Smith's The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, which received the prestigious Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School, and has been described by Hilton Kramer as "the best book ever written about the press."

From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Smith served as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. His combination of highly publicized temporary exhibitions and innovative educational outreach programs more than doubled annual visitation. He also instigated a $6.5 million renovation and expansion of the museum and library. For most of 1990, Mr. Smith did double duty as Director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, Kansas, where he organized the Eisenhower Centennial on behalf of the National Archives. From 1993 to 1996, Mr. Smith was the Director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Executive Director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California.

In March 1996, Mr. Smith became Director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, where he supervised a $5 million renovation, as well as a series of temporary exhibits and conferences which generated national interest and dramatically boosted museum visitation and fundraising. In September, 2000 he became the first Executive Director of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, a position he left in December, 2001 to assume the directorship of the new Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

— Courtesy the Dole Institute