AS SEEN ON C-SPAN! Discover American history and the many advantages of traveling on one of our guided, personally hosted, small group motor coach tours. All tours are hosted and led by renowned author and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.
AS SEEN ON C-SPAN! Discover the advantages of traveling on one of our guided, personally hosted, small group tours. Each of our two annual tours is hosted and led by renowned author and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith. A frequent guest on PBS’ NewsHour, Mr. Smith also serves as C-SPAN’s in-house historian, where he is responsible for such long form series as Presidential Libraries: History Uncovered, The Contenders, and the current Influence and Image: America’s First Ladies. Mr. Smith has been director of the Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museums, as well as founding director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. He has a rare gift for making history real, relevant, and entertaining. “There’s no excuse for a dull book, a dull museum, or a dull tour,” he says, “especially when dealing with history, the most fascinating subject I know.”
www.presidentsandpatriots.com
Our deluxe motor coach tours are designed with your comfort and enjoyment in mind, and our small group setting (est. 18 - 28 persons) create a much more intimate, personal setting when compared with other tours who attempt to fill their motor coaches to capacity. Many of our guests are repeat participants. This fact, combined with a shared interest in the history being experienced, makes for an unusually relaxed, fun and friendly atmosphere.
If you are a C-SPAN viewer, you may have seen one or more of our itineraries featured over the past several years. C-SPAN has been along with us on several past trips, and has broadcast segments on their history channel, C-SPAN 3.
What our guided tours include:
• Each tour hosted in its entirety by author and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.
• Outstanding overnight accommodations, many in historic settings, and including all taxes and gratuities.
• Nearly all meals, including all breakfasts and lunches and most dinners (we do this to allow, at your option, some free time to explore, apart from the group setting).
• Special extras available nowhere else – from a poolside barbeque at the LBJ Ranch to informal encounters with world-renowned scholars or a behind-the-scenes history of the Waldorf’s Presidential Suite from inside the suite itself.
• Admission fees to all historic sites, museums and attractions listed on the itinerary.
• Complete baggage handling throughout the tour for your primary piece of luggage.
• All taxes, fees and gratuities for all group functions, including meals, guides, bellmen, and motor coach driver.
• Deluxe ground transportation via climate controlled motor coach, featuring on-board restroom and the latest amenities, including 110-volt power supply (for cell phones, DVD players, iPads or lap tops), as well as free Wi-Fi (wireless internet) throughout the coach.
We handle all of this! All you need to do is:
• Since we are not a full-service travel agency, we can save you money by allowing you to make your own “to and from” arrangements ... you will be able to book your own transportation to the city where your tour will begin, and from the city where your tour ends.
• We do all the rest!
For more information, click below on either our Spring (June) or Fall (October) tour itineraries or telephone us directly at (202) 657-7444.
About your Tour Host ... Richard Norton Smith
Richard Norton Smith is a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he appears regularly as part of the show's round table of historians. 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 free lance writer for The Washington Post. In 1977, Mr. Smith became a speech writer for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke.
Two years later he went to work for Senator Bob Dole. He collaborated with the Doles on their joint autobiography, Unlimited Partners (1988; revised 1996). More recently he assisted Senator Dole on his 1998 book of political humor, Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House, and a sequel, Great Presidential Wit, published early in 2001.
Perhaps best-known as a historian and biographer, Mr. Smith is currently at work on a life of Nelson A. Rockefeller based on extensive original research and interviews with Rockefeller associates. 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). In June 1997, Houghton Mifflin published Mr. Smith's The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, which received the prestigious Goldsmith Prize awarded by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School, and has been described by Hilton Kramer as "the best book ever written about the press."
Between 1987 and 2001, Mr. Smith served as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center in Abilene, Kansas; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California; the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Michigan respectively.
In December, 2001 Mr. Smith became director of the new Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he supervised construction of the Institute's $11.3 million permanent home and launched a Presidential Lecture Series and other high profile programs.
In October, 2003 Smith was appointed Founding Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a four building complex in Springfield, Illinois which opened in 2004.
Mr. Smith is presently a Scholar in Residence at George Mason University in Virginia.
"There's no excuse for a dull book, a dull museum, or a dull tour," says Smith. "Especially when dealing with history - the most fascinating subject I know."
Presidents and Patriots and it's travel partners support furthering the educational and cultural knowledge of its members; promotes a greater understanding of American history through first hand experiences via travel and other activities all designed to promote and enhance the appreciation of history.
Deluxe, small group motor coach tours throughout the United States. Personally hosted and led by author and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith.
