Conservative Heroes: A Conversation with Amity Shlaes and Garland S. Tucker III

Join President Gregory A. Thornbury for a conversation with Amity Shlaes and finance legend and author, Garland S. Tucker, III, on unlikely conservative heroes on Wednesday, April 12 from 12:15 PM to 1:15 PM in The King’s College City Room.

Tucker is the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Triangle Capital Corporation and Former Chief Executive Officer (2001-2016). Prior to Triangle Capital Corporation’s IPO in 2007, Mr. Tucker co-founded Triangle Capital Corporation’s predecessor companies, Triangle Capital Partners, LLC and Triangle Mezzanine Fund LLLP in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Triangle Capital Corporation a specialty finance company, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and shares trade under the symbol “TCAP.”

Prior to co-founding Triangle, Mr. Tucker, with a group of outside investors, founded First Travelcorp, a corporate travel services company in 1991. After making a series of fourteen acquisitions and becoming the largest corporate travel services company in the Southeast, he led the sale of First Travelcorp to a public company in 1999.

For the two years preceding the founding of First Travelcorp, Mr. Tucker served as Group Vice President, Chemical Bank, New York, with responsibility for southeastern corporate finance.

Prior to Chemical Bank, Mr. Tucker spent a decade with Carolina Securities Corporation, serving as President and Chief Executive Officer until 1988. He was a member of the New York Stock Exchange and served a term as President of the Mid-Atlantic Securities Industry Association. He entered the securities business in 1975 with Investment Corporation of Virginia.

Mr. Tucker is a graduate of Washington & Lee University (B.S., magna cum laude) and Harvard Business School (MBA).

He serves on a number of private company boards, as well as trustee of several non-profit institutions including Trinity School for Ministry (Pittsburgh), the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, the Civitas Institute, and Fellowship of Christians in Universities and Schools (FOCUS).

He formerly served as a Director or Trustee of the following organizations: Chatham Hall School, Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, Peace College, Templeton Honors College, and N. C. Museum of Art. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Carolina Country Club, Roaring Gap Club, and Harvard Club of NYC. He was the founding Senior Warden of Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Raleigh.

A life long student of history, he is the author of The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge and the 1924 Election (Emerald Books, 2010) and Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Changed America – Jefferson to Reagan (ISI Books, 2015) as well as articles for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review, American Thinker, and other publications.

He was married in 1972 to the former Greyson Shuff. They have two daughters and five grandchildren. In addition to tennis, he and his wife are avid gardeners. Their Raleigh garden has been featured in Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Walter, and Carolina Gardener.

Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic, a full length illustrated version of the same book drawn by Paul Rivoche, Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americas Crazy. National Review called the Forgotten Man “the finest history of the Great Depression ever written.” The Economist wrote of Coolidge that the book “deserves to be widely read” and made it an editor’s choice for 2013. The Forgotten Man: Graphic reached the number 1 spot in its bestseller category. Miss Shlaes is under contract to write “The Silent Majority,” a third volume on the twentieth century.

Miss Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, a national foundation based in the birthplace of President Coolidge. The Foundation’s goal is to share Coolidge with Americans, by hosting high school debate and events at the Coolidge site and through newer media. She is especially interested in education.

Miss Shlaes is winner of the Hayek Prize and currently chairs the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy, and later chaired the jury for that prize. In 2003, she was JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy at the American Academy in Berlin.

In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her lecture, titled “The Chicken versus the Eagle” looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal. Over the years she has served at the Council on Foreign Relations (as senior fellow in economic history) and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, where she was one of four directors, working on economic program.

Miss Shlaes serves at Presidential Scholar at The King’s College, where she teaches Coolidge. Prior to teaching at King’s, Miss Shlaes taught at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Many readers know Miss Shlaes from the Wall Street Journal, where she served on the editorial board, writing on foreign policy, taxation and other topics, or from the Financial Times and Bloomberg, each of which carried her syndicated column over the years. Currently Miss Shlaes appears in print Forbes and in National Review. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College, Miss Shlaes is married to fellow journalist and editor Seth Lipsky. The Lipskys have four children.

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Contact events@tkc.edu with questions or inquiries.