Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Great Environmental Awakening

WDB Lecture Series

Dr. Douglas Brinkley

“Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Great Environmental Awakening”
Dr. Douglas Brinkley
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
11:30 AM | Payson Library, Surfboard Room
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Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, presidential historian for the New-York Historical Society and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Archives Foundation, the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress, and both the Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Libraries. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s

New Past Master”. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies Brinkley has written/edited three New York Times bestselling books on Ronald Reagan: The Boys of Point du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (2005); The Reagan Diaries (2007); and The Notes (2011). More recently, his two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes (2014-15) won the Arthur S. Link–Warren F. Kuehl Prize. Brinkley has also written on World War II, the Vietnam War, the National Parks system, John F. Kennedy, Rosa Parks, Gerald R. Ford, Bob Dylan, Hurricane Katrina, Henry Ford and Walter Cronkite which all received critical acclaim. Six of his nonfiction books have been chosen as New York Times’s “Notable Books of the Year”. Brinkley has also won two Grammy Awards in the jazz category for the albums Presidential Suite and Fandango at the Wall. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family.