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 focuses on the intersection of power, politics, and crisis—including ten books on topics like the presidency, World War II, 9/11, the Cold War, Watergate, and cybersecurity, 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. Graff’s dedication to capturing pivotal moments in American history through meticulous research and compelling narratives has solidified his reputation as a leading voice in contemporary journalism and historical analysis.
Today he writes the popular Doomsday Scenario newsletter, serves as a director at the Aspen Institute’s technology program, Aspen Digital, and hosts the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning and Peabody-nominated 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 ten books, including The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the national bestseller, Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, and UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There, as well as co-authoring 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.”
He is perhaps best known for his three landmark volumes of oral history — including the #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, which compiled the voices of 500 Americans as they experienced that tragic day. The Wall Street Journal called it a “a priceless civic gift,” and Le Monde said it was “an exceptional document [and] brilliant work of immediate history.” 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.”
His 2024 book, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, 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.”
Most recently, his third volume of oral history, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky, about the making and use of the atomic bomb, published in the summer of 2025 for the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II. Publisher’s Weekly called it “magisterial.”
He is the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s cybersecurity and technology program, where he helped start the prestigious Aspen Cybersecurity Group, and has a long history as a new media pioneer. He was the founding editor of mediaBistro.com’s FishbowlDC, a popular blog that covered the media and journalism in Washington, and co-founder of EchoDitto, Inc., an internet strategy consulting firm at the dawn of the social media age. During his time at FishbowlDC, he was the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing in 2005. A Vermont native and graduate of Harvard, he served as deputy press secretary on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean’s first webmaster.
Among other multimedia, TV, and film projects, he was executive producer of “While the Rest of Us Die,” a two-season VICE TV series based on his book Raven Rock, and a consulting producer on the blockbuster Netflix documentary “Turning Point,” about the Cold War.
Previously, he taught at Georgetown University for seven years, including courses on journalism and technology, has served on the boards of the Burlington Housing Authority, Vermont Public Radio, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and he has received a doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, from Champlain College.
Over the years, his writing and commentary has also appeared in publications like the The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, 5280, AARP Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Daily News, The Week, Eater, Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine, USA Today, GQ UK, NextCity, and he has appeared on Face the Nation, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, the History Channel, National Geographic, and various NPR programs, including “This American Life,” “Fresh Air,” and “All Things Considered.”
Throughout his career and work, Graff remains committed to one guiding idea: that understanding history is not a luxury—it’s a civic responsibility.
