Karl Zinsmeister

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Karl Zinsmeister (born 1959) was appointed in June 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 lives in rural upstate New York with his wife and three children.

Zinsmeister is a graduate of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and has also studied history at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He won college 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 later the J. B. Fuqua Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent Washington DC think tank, where he researched a range of topics extending from social welfare and demographics to economics and cultural trends. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Reader's Digest, the Wall Street Journal and many 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 around the U.S. and the globe.

He covered the Iraq war as an embedded journalist during the 2003 invasion and then three subsequent months-long embeddings during the insurgency stage. He 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.

His appointment to the White House saw some controversy. In 2004, Zinsmeister posted to the American Enterprise Institute website an article from the Syracuse New Times about himself. In the process, he also altered a previous statement attributed to him in which he had said that "people in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings." He subsequently admitted that it was "foolish" to do so, but claimed that he did so to correct the record without criticizing the mistakes of a young journalist.^[2] This resulted in a heated exchange between White House press secretary Tony Snow and longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas.^[3]

Later in 2006, the New York Sun reported that Zinsmeister may have run afoul of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 while editing The American Enterprise by taking out advertisements that sought "young" applicants. Further, Zinsmeister used a pseudonym – belonging to the long-dead British writer who Gilbert Chesterton – in some of the ads.^[4]