The Highest Calling: Conversations on the American Presidency Audiobook

About David M. Rubenstein

David M. Rubenstein is the New York Times bestselling author, host of The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV and PBS, an original signer of The Giving Pledge, and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award. He is chairman of the boards of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is cofounder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity firms.

About the Narrators

Douglas Brinkley is an acclaimed historian and award-winning author of many books, including six New York Times bestsellers. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” His book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and his two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link–Warren F. Kuehl Prize. Other awards he has won include the Frances K. Hutchison Medal, Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lifetime Heritage Award. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies.

Peter Baker is the senior White House correspondent for the New York Times and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Breach, about Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and Kremlin Rising, about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with his wife, Susan Glasser.

Ron Chernow’s first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award and the Ambassador Award for his contribution to the study of American culture. Washington: A Life won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Alexander Hamilton was the inspiration for the Broadway musical. The Warburgs won the Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing in 1993 and was also selected by the American Library Association as one of that year’s best nonfiction books.

Ted Widmer is distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York. In addition to his teaching, he writes actively about American history in the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and other venues. He has also taught or directed research centers at Harvard University, Brown University, and Washington College. He grew up in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and attended Harvard University.

Richard Norton Smith is the author of Thomas E. Dewey and His Times and biographies of George Washington and Herbert Hoover. A distinguished political speechwriter, he has worked especially closely with Bob and Elizabeth Dole, with whom he collaborated on their bestselling memoir Unlimited Partners. The director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, he lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Maggie Haberman is a journalist who joined the New York Times in 2015 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on the investigations into Donald Trump’s, and his advisers’, connections to Russia. She has twice been a member of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, in 2021 for reporting on the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, and in 2022 for coverage related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Before joining the New York Times as a campaign correspondent, she worked as a political reporter at Politico, from 2010 to 2015. She previously worked at the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of several books, including The Last Politician, a New York Times bestseller. For seven years, he edited the New Republic.

Amity Shlaes is the author of the New York Times bestseller Coolidge, as well as The Forgotten Man and The Greedy Hand, among others. She chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. She was the 2002 co-winner of the International Policy Network’s Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy. Over the years, she has written for The New Yorker, The American Spectator, Commentary, The Spectator (UK), Foreign Affairs, Forbes, National Review, The New Republic, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Zeit, among others.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of several books of nonfiction, including The Hemingses of Monticello, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

Candice Millard is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic, and Hero of the Empire. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, the Washington Post, and the New York Times Book Review.

Jeffrey Frank was a senior editor at the New Yorker, the deputy editor of the Washington Post’s Outlook section, and is the author of Ike and Dick. He has published four novels, among them the Washington Trilogy—The Columnist, Bad Publicity, and Trudy Hopedale. And he is the coauthor, with Diana Crone Frank, of a new translation of Hans Christian Andersen stories, which won the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Prize. He is a contributor to the New Yorker and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian, Bookforum, and Vogue, among other publications.

Jonathan Darman is a writer in New York City. He is a former correspondent for Newsweek, where he covered national politics, including John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 and Hillary Clinton’s in 2008.

Kai Bird is a journalist, the author of numerous books, and the coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was the basis for the Academy Award–winning film Oppenheimer. The Biographers International Organization named him winner of its 2024 BIO Award for his “significant contributions to the art and craft of biography.” His other books include The Chairman and The Color of Truth, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.