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Timothy Naftali of Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and author of George H.W. Bush and Khrushchev's Cold War will deliver the January Bradley Lecture.

Americans have a hard time being realists. George Herbert Walker Bush was no exception. Nevertheless, his instincts were realistic, and, for that reason, sound. The ways Bush handled the end of the Cold War, built the coalition that won the Gulf War, and managed Sino-American relations demonstrated his capacity for acting like a realist even while sounding like an idealist.

Timothy Naftali is the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, a part of the National Archives and Records Administration. Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein appointed him director-designate of the Nixon Library in April 2006. Mr. Naftali served as director of the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff at the National Archives from October 2006 until the Nixon Library entered the federal system of presidential libraries on July 11, 2007. Before joining the National Archives, he taught history at several universities, including the University of Virginia, where he also served as director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Mr. Naftali is a prolific writer for both popular and scholarly audiences. His work has appeared on Slate and in the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. He is the author of several books, including Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (Basic Books, 2005) and, with Aleksander Fursenko, “One Hell of A Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (Norton, 1997). His most recent book, also cowritten with Fursenko, is Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (Norton, 2006), which received the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature in June 2007. Mr. Naftali was a consultant to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. He was also a consultant on the history of U.S. counterterrorism policy to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (popularly known as the 9/11 Commission).