Roger Morris

Author’s Biography-Watkins-Loomis Literary Agency

Roger Morris is the award-winning author of acclaimed books on American politics. His Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952 won the National Book Award Silver Medal, was a finalist for the National Critics Circle Award in Biography, and was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America was a New York Times best-seller and another “Notable Book.”

He co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, the basis of a forthcoming series by Dick Wolf for NBC/ Universal and hailed by The Los Angeles Times as “one of the most important non-fiction books published in the U.S. in a half-century.”

He has just completed Between the Graves—a history of US covert intervention in Afghanistan and South Asia. He is at work on Kindred Rivals: America, Russia and Their Failed Ideals, a comparative history of the United States and Soviet Union.

His other works include Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, Haig: The General’s Progress, The Devil’s Butcher Shop: The New Mexico Prison Uprising, and The Reader’s Companion to the American Presidency.

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellow. Among numerous honors, he has twice won the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ National Award for Distinguished Investigative Journalism, including its Medal for “the finest investigative reporting across all media nationwide.”

Born and raised in the Midwest, he holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, served in the United States Foreign Service, on the White House Staff, and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. One of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s two-person Special Projects Staff, he was intimately involved in the first highly secret peace negotiations with North Vietnam to secure a U.S. withdrawal and end to the war in Southeast Asia prior to the Cambodian invasion in 1970.

After leaving the White House, he was a senior legislative aide in the U.S. Senate 1970-72 and Director of Humanitarian Policy Studies 1972-74 for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he co-authored two news-making Carnegie books, Passing By on the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda, and Disaster in the Desert on the failures of international relief programs.

He has taught at Harvard, the City University of New York, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Washington, lectured internationally, and was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the British Museum, a Fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard, and for an academic year an Exchange Scholar at Moscow State University in the then-USSR, where he was the first American to study at an Institute of the Academy of Sciences.

A Contributing Editor to The New Republic 1975-1987, he has also written for Harper’s, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Columbia Journalism Review, and was a Contributing Editor to the Book Review and Op-Ed of The Globe and Mail of Canada 2001-14. Over the 1990’s, he was Host and Producer of a weekly public affairs program and numerous specials for public television in Albuquerque, and was elected to national boards of Common Cause, OXFAM, and the National Council for International Visitors.

His Strategic Demands of the Twenty-First Century: New Vision for a New World, co-authored with Steven Schmidt, was published by the Green Institute in 2005. The 2006 documentary on US policy in Africa, Guns, Greed and Genocide, in which he was Co-Producer, was an award-winner at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. His 2008 profiles of Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates for TomDispatch.com and Times of Asia gained worldwide attention. In 2009 the New York Times chose him as one of five distinguished American historians to write the paper’s 100 Days Blog, setting the Obama Administration in the perspective of earlier presidencies.

He lives on San Juan Island in Washington state.