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 freelance writer for The Washington Post. He became a speechwriter for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke and then Kansas Senator Bob Dole, with whom he collaborated on numerous projects over the years.

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).^[2] His 1997 biography of Robert R. McCormick, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, received the Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1998.^[3]

Between 1987 and 2001, 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, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, California; and the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In 2001, Smith created Presidents and Patriots History Tours, leading a biannual series of historical tours emphasizing American presidents and history seldom found in textbooks. In December 2001, he became director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There he supervised the construction of the Institute's permanent home and launched a Presidential Lecture Series and other programs.

In October 2003, Smith was appointed the first Executive Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a four-building complex in Springfield, Illinois.

In 2009, Smith was invited by the U.S. Congress to be one of two historians addressing it on the two-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Earlier, he delivered a eulogy at Gerald Ford's Michigan funeral, a role he repeated at Betty Ford's request when she was buried beside her husband in 2011.

In 2014, Smith published On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller. Smith took 14 years to write the book and said that he spent about $250,000 of his own money on the project.^[4] In an interview with C-SPAN, he said that Random House provided an advance of $50,000 for the book.^[4]

Smith's most recent book, released in April 2023, is An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford.

• Richard Norton Smith - Official Website
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Presidents and Patriots Tours, by Richard Norton Smith - Official Website