Luke A. Nichter is the James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and U.S. political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy through Watergate using consequential moments from recent history to better understand contemporary politics.

He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute, a Hansard Research Scholar at the London School of Economics, and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at York St. John University.

Luke is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of numerous books, including The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale), awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and chosen a Best Book of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale), awarded an NEH Public Scholar Grant, and Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge). He is working on two new projects: an edited volume of Richard Nixon's correspondence, and a book tentatively titled LBJ: The White House Years of Lyndon Johnson.

He is a noted expert on the secret White House recordings of Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon, and wrote a history of their taping systems commissioned by the White House Historical Association. His website, nixontapes.org, featured by CBS Sunday Morning, was the basis for The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 (HMH). Co-edited with Douglas Brinkley, along with sequel The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (HMH), the volumes won the Link-Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, were called among the best books on the 1970s, and are the most cited on the Nixon presidency.

Luke is a former founding Executive Producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, launched in 2011 in 41 million homes. A feature is "American Artifacts," which lets viewers experience a museum, an archive, or historic site behind the scenes. In 2020, the White House announced his appointment to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which was created in 1966 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society – transforming the federal government to protector of historic, cultural, and tribal sites.

His effort to file over 3,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to open historically important records to public access was endorsed by the American Historical Association. His petition before Judge Royce Lamberth unsealed thousands of pages of government records in the custody of the National Archives. In 2022, Luke was appointed by the Archivist of the United States to serve on the federal government's FOIA Advisory Committee. In 2024, the Orange County Business Journal named him one of the Top 500 most influential people in Orange County, California.

Luke earned his Ph.D. in Policy History from Bowling Green State University. Growing up in rural Ohio, he got his first taste of politics in the Speaker's Office, then later worked for a House of Representatives committee and a British Member of Parliament and Foreign and Commonwealth Office Near East Affairs minister.

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