Al Hunt

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Al Hunt (born January 1, 1942) is the Washington managing editor for Bloomberg News. From 1988 to 2005, Hunt was a panelist and moderator on CNN's The Capital Gang with Robert Novak, Mark Shields, Kate O'Beirne and Margaret Carlson.

He is married to Judy Woodruff of PBS.

Previously, Hunt was a member of the long-running Novak, Hunt & Shields, the weekly CNN program featuring in-depth interviews with top newsmakers.

Prior to joining Bloomberg News in January 2005, Hunt worked for the Wall Street Journal. During his 35 years in the newspaper’s Washington bureau, he was a congressional and national political reporter, a bureau chief and, most recently, executive Washington editor. For 11 years, Hunt wrote the weekly column, "Politics & People". Hunt also directed the paper's political polls for 20 years and served as president of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and a board member of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., a Dow Jones subsidiary.

Hunt has also served as a periodic panelist on NBC's Meet the Press and PBS' Washington Week in Review, as well as a political analyst on CBS Morning News. He is co-author of a series of books published by the American Enterprise Institute, including The American Elections of 1980, The American Elections of 1982 and The American Elections of 1984. In 1987, he co-authored Elections American Style for the Brookings Institution. In 2002, he contributed an essay about campaign finance reform for Caroline Kennedy's Profiles in Courage for Our Time.

In April 1986, while eating at a Dallas restaurant with his wife and their 4-year-old son, Hunt recalls a drunk George W. Bush stormed over to their table and unloaded on him: "You fucking son of a bitch. I saw what you wrote. We're not going to forget this." Hunt had predicted in the April edition of Washingtonian that Jack Kemp would lead the GOP nomination rather than George H.W. Bush. Bush would apologize to Hunt over a decade later.^[1]

In 1999, Hunt received the William Allen White Foundation's national citation, one of the highest honors in journalism. In 1995, he and his wife, CNN anchor Judy Woodruff, received the Allen H. Neuharth Award for Excellence in Journalism from the University of South Dakota. In 1976, Hunt received a Raymond Clapper Award for Washington reporting.

Before graduating from college, Hunt worked for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Winston-Salem Journal. In 1965, he became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York, before transferring to its Boston bureau in 1967, then to the Washington, D.C., bureau in 1969.

Hunt is a member of the Wake Forest board of trustees; the board of the Children's Charities in Washington; and the advisory board of the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. He teaches a course on the press and politics at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications.

Hunt graduated from The Haverford School in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in 1960. He attended Wake Forest University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science.