Professional Affiliation

Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies, Rutgers University.

Expert Bio

David Greenberg is a Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is currently writing a biography of Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights leader, for Simon & Schuster. He is the author or editor of several books on American history and politics including Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (2003); Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016); Calvin Coolidge (2006); and Alan Brinkley: A Life in History (2019). Formerly acting editor of the New Republic and columnist for Slate, he now writes for Politico, among many other scholarly and popular publications. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale and lives with his family in Manhattan.

Wilson Center Project

"The Story of Spin: Presidential Persuasion from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush"

Project Summary

"The Story of Spin"—the title is tentative—describes the rise in 20th-Century American presidential politics of the tools and techniques of presidential persuasion, or what we now call "spin." From the Progressive Era onward, it shows how politicians and their aides built the vast apparatus of speechwriters, pollsters, public relations gurus and consultants that now shapes their daily decisions about governance. Simultaneously, it describes the responses to spin's development from journalists, intellectuals, and others who celebrated or worried about the changes that our political system and culture were undergoing. The interplay of these political innovations and the critical responses to them reveals an ongoing concern throughout the century about spin's effect on democracy—attesting, perhaps, to audiences' continued ability to resist being taken in by spin for very long.

Major Publications

• Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003).
• Calvin Coolidge (Henry Holt, 2006).
• Numerous book chapters, journal articles, book reviews, essays in The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Daedalus, Raritan and other scholarly and popular publications