
Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is an author and syndicated columnist whose column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers since 1979. A new column also appears on Yahoo! News each Friday. He has received dozens of awards for his work in print, television and film.
Educated as a mechanical engineer, Richard Reeves began his career in journalism at the age of 23, founding the Phillipsburg Free Press in Phillipsburg, N.J. He has been a correspondent for the Newark Evening News and the New York Herald Tribune and was the Chief Political Correspondent of The New York Times. He has also written for numerous other publications, becoming National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine along the way. Named a "literary lion" by the New York Public Library, Reeves has won a number of print journalism awards and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and juror.
In 1975, Reeves published his first book, A Ford, not a Lincoln. His President Kennedy: Profile of Power is now considered the authoritative work on the 35th president, has won several national awards and was named the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993 by Time and Book of the Year by Washington Monthly.
Reeves has also worked extensively on television and in film. He was Chief Correspondent on "Frontline". He has made six television films and won all of television's major documentary awards: the Emmy for "Lights, Camera . . . Politics!" for ABC News; the Columbia-DuPont Award for "Struggle for Birmingham" for PBS; and the George Foster Peabody Award for "Red Star over Khyber" for PBS. He has also appeared in two feature films, "Dave" and "Seabiscuit".
In 1998, he won the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association for distinguished contributions to the understanding of American politics. He was the Goldman Lecturer on American Civilization and Government at the Library of Congress that year; the lectures were published by Harvard University Press under the title What the People Know: Freedom and the Press.
In 2007, W.W. Norton published his biography - and re-creation of the experiments - of Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel prizewinning physicist, who was born on the frontier of New Zealand in 1871 and went on to become the greatest experimental scientist of his time, discovering the unimagined subatomic world we now know and then splitting the atom he first envisioned. In 2010, he published two books: "Daring Young Men" the story of the Berlin Airlift, published by Simon and Schuster, which became a New York Times bestseller and was named Best Book of the Year by the Christian Science Monitor and best history book of the year by the Book-of-the-Month club. "Portrait of Camelot: A thousand days in the Kennedy White House" was published by Abrams book at the end of the year. He is currently working on a book on the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans by the United States government during World War II.
LOS ANGELES —- In 1976, to my regret, I wrote what amounted to an obituary of the Republican Party. Writing about the Democratic Convention in New York that year, I said:
LOS ANGELES — It would seem that the United States has a five-party system right now. What was done in Iowa last Tuesday could unravel in New Hampshire, but whatever happens next, the United States is more politically fractured than it has been in decades.
DALLAS — One of the darker pages of American history was illustrated by film of South Vietnamese, many of whom had worked for the American military or diplomatic corps for years, desperately trying to get into the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and being pushed and batted away by Marines as the last Americans climbed to the roof to escape the advancing North Vietnamese troops by helicopter.
LOS ANGELES — Scanning the latest national polls, it seems that only 17 percent of Americans — fewer than one in five — say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. Only 11 percent have confidence in the U.S. Congress, and the same percentage believe that old one about the country being headed in the right direction. Two out of three respondents think the economy is going in the wrong direction. This in the land of hope and glory.
WASHINGTON — Mention the name of the man of the hour around here and people all seem to have the same reaction. They shake their heads. Some seem amused, some angry, some frightened. Despite living most of his adult life here, Newt Gingrich does not have many friends among his neighbors.
WASHINGTON — I first met Barney Frank in 1979, when he was a state legislator in Massachusetts. We spoke the same language, Jersey cynical, because we grew up a couple of miles from each other. He was from Bayonne and I was from Jersey City, the jewel of Hudson County.
WASHINGTON — Like most reporters here in the 1980s, I liked Newt Gingrich and spent time listening to his office lectures every few weeks. He was smart, he was candid about most things, wrong about others — and funny in his hypercharged way. He was young and irreverent — like us — and he was on his way to taking over the Republicans in Congress and then Congress itself. His ambition was boundless, but he was changing the rules in Washington for better or worse.
LOS ANGELES — The good news of the day is that Bill Moyers is coming back to television next January. The bad news is that Coca-Cola seems to be winning its battle to fill the Grand Canyon with empty plastic bottles.
LOS ANGELES — By chance, the three things that landed in my inbox — that's a polite euphemism for "pile" — on Tuesday were these:
DETROIT — Looking at the newspapers this morning, I noticed that Tom Brokaw was making a speech in New York. It made me wonder if he was working on a sequel to his books on "The Greatest Generation." This one might be called "The Worst Generation."
LOS ANGELES — I was pleasantly surprised last Wednesday when I asked a roomful of students at the University of Southern California how many had watched the Republican candidates' debate the night before and dozens of hands went up, more than half the students, maybe two-thirds.
LOS ANGELES — I am all for Occupy Wall Street — and a lot of other places — but I wish I understood where this is going. And why it took so long to get going.
LOS ANGELES — Who's left? Is there a good-looking, smart state legislator out there somewhere whom the Republican parties could agree on as their candidate?
LOS ANGELES — President Obama came out here last Tuesday to proclaim himself a "warrior for the middle class." Would that it were true.
BERKELEY, Calif. — Democrats should be building statues of former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, or at least giving away copies of her new book, "A Governor's Story."
LOS ANGELES — "Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on 'Lost Decade'" was the lead headline in last Wednesday's New York Times.
LOS ANGELES — Karl Rove, pundit for now, continued to pound away at his favorite target, Sarah Palin, over the summer, saying this time she was too "thin-skinned" to be president.
LOS ANGELES — The phrase "the general welfare" of the people is part of the U.S. Constitution that so many political folk wave around these days — arguing basically that the problems and assumptions of 1789 remain inviolate in the 21st century.
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a man who would be king, has written a book. It's called "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington."