Graff to Speak in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids
Historian, journalist, and author Garrett Graff joins the Hauenstein Center to discuss two major oral histories about the major turning points of World War II: the D-Day invasion of Europe as well as the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Japan.
He will explore the legacy of the Greatest Generation, how World War II changed the world, and the first-person realities of fighting in the greatest conflict humanity has ever known.
Join us to learn the previously untold stories of leadership and determination at all levels of the American war effort in World War II, from the Oval Office to the front lines.
Details on Attending
Where & When
Tuesday, September 2, 2025, 6:30 PM:
Ford Presidential Library
1000 Beal Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Wednesday, September 3, 2025, 6 PM:
Grand Valley State University Pew Campus
Loosemore Auditorium, Richard M. DeVos Center
401 W. Fulton St W, Grand Rapids, MI 49504
Program Supporters
Thank you to the following supporters who are bringing Garrett Graff to be part of the Greatest Generation Celebration:
Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security, and is now recognized as one of the nation’s most prolific and wide-ranging journalists and historians. His award-winning work—including nine books on topics ranging from presidential campaigns, Watergate, 9/11, and cybersecurity, to D-Day and the U.S. government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as dozens of magazine articles, essays, podcasts, and documentaries—uses history to explain the story of today, illuminating where we’ve been as a country and where we’re headed as a world.
Currently, he’s a columnist for the Washington Post, where he writes on leadership, serves as the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, and hosts the award-winning history podcast, Long Shadow . The former editor of POLITICO Magazine and Washingtonian, and a longtime contributor to WIRED and CNN, he’s written for publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, New York, and Foreign Affairs.
Graff is the author of multiple books, including The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the national bestseller, Raven Rock , about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as co-author of Dawn of the Code War, tracing the global cybersecurity threat.
Among his multiple New York Times bestsellers, his book Watergate: A New History was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, called “dazzling” by Douglas Brinkley in the New York Times Book Review and “standard-setting” by Kirkus Reviews. In a review for the Washington Post, Len Downie, Jr., wrote, “Do we need still another Watergate book? The answer turns out to be yes — this one.”
The #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 , compiled the voices of 500 Americans as they experienced that tragic day, was called a “a priceless civic gift” by the Wall Street Journal, as well as “an exceptional document [and] brilliant work of immediate history” by Le Monde. It was also named the industry’s 2020 Audiobook of the Year, saying, “Graff has created a historical document with the deftness of a poet.”
More recently, he’s published UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There and When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, which also was an instant New York Times bestseller and spent multiple weeks on national bestseller lists. The Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote When the Sea Came Alive was “absolutely gripping” and in a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly called it, “gripping and propulsive” and “a panoramic view of an astonishingly intricate plan coming to fruition, undertaken by men and women with a clear sense of its momentousness. Readers will be spellbound.”
