Karl Zinsmeister

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Karl W. Zinsmeister (born 1959) was appointed in May 2006 to serve as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and director of the Domestic Policy Council, for U.S. President George W. Bush.

Zinsmeister is a graduate of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and has also studied history at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. While in college, he won national rowing championships in both the U.S. and Ireland. His first job in Washington was as a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat. He was the J. B. Fuqua Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Reader's Digest, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Before becoming the White House Domestic Policy Adviser, he was Editor in Chief from 1994 to 2006 of The American Enterprise, a national magazine covering politics, business, and culture.^[1] He wrote many articles for that publication, and reported stories from many parts of the U.S. and around the world, including covering the war in Iraq as an embedded journalist.

He also covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an embedded journalist and shot a documentary film about soldiers in Iraq, called "WARRIORS", for PBS. He wrote three books of Iraq reporting: Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq, and Combat Zone: True Tales of G.I.s in Iraq (a non-fiction graphic novel from Marvel Comics). He edited a book on world population trends, and edited and contributed to a collection of non-fiction short stories.

A sixth-generation resident of upstate New York, Zinsmeister lives in the village of Cazenovia in Madison County near Ithaca, with his wife and three children.