Richard Norton Smith (born October 2, 1953) is an American historian and author, specializing in United States presidents and other political figures. In the past, he worked as a freelance writer for The Washington Post, and worked with U.S. senators Edward Brooke and Bob Dole.
Early life and education
Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1953, Smith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1975 with a degree in government. Following graduation he worked as a White House intern and as a freelance writer for The Washington Post. He became a speechwriter for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke and then Kansas Senator Bob Dole, with whom he collaborated on numerous projects over the years.
Smith's first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984); The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986); and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993).[2] His 1997 biography of Robert R. McCormick, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, received the Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1998.[3]
In 2001, Smith created Presidents and Patriots History Tours, leading a biannual series of historical tours emphasizing American presidents and history seldom found in textbooks. In December 2001, he became director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he supervised the construction of the Institute's permanent home and launched a Presidential Lecture Series and other programs.
In 2009, Smith was invited by the U.S. Congress to be one of two historians addressing it on the two-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Earlier, he delivered a eulogy at Gerald Ford's Michigan funeral, a role he repeated at Betty Ford's request when she was buried beside her husband in 2011.
In 2014, Smith published On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller. Smith took 14 years to write the book and said that he spent about $250,000 of his own money on the project.[4] In an interview with C-SPAN, he said that Random House provided an advance of $50,000 for the book.[4]
Smith's most recent book, released in April 2023, is An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford.
