Ron Suskind
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Ron Suskind is a former Wall Street Journal reporter (1993 to 2000) and is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer (1995, for Feature Writing).
[edit] Pulitzer Prize
The stories that won him the Pulitzer involved inner-city honors students in Washington, D.C.
Those stories were the starting point for his book, "A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (Broadway/Random House, 1998). The novelistic nonfiction work, which follows the three year path of a religious African-American student from a blighted DC high school to Brown University, became a favorite in book clubs and was critically acclaimed as reframing national debates on race and education.
[edit] Background
Suskind, who left the Wall Street Journal in 2000 as the paper's senior national affairs reporter, wrote two stories in Esquire magazine in 2002 that were among the first stories to show the inner workings of the Bush White House. In the first one about presidential adviser Karen Hughes (June 2002), White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said that the pragmatic Hughes was "the beauty to Karl's beast," referring to the more ideological Karl Rove, and that her imminent resignation would mean the administration may veer to the political right. Suskind's second Esquire story (December, 2002) about Rove carried the comments and a long memo from Bush's former head of Faith-based programs, John DiIulio, the first top official to leave the White House and speak candidly about his experiences, criticized a White House for having "no policy apparatus" and fixating on political calculation — "It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
On January 13, 2004, his book on Paul O'Neill and the George W. Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (ISBN 0-7432-5545-3), was published, revealing controversial details about the early years of the Bush administration. Among the many revelations in the book, which drew from numerous sources and more than 19,000 internal government documents, was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and U.S. occupation of Iraq was planned from the Bush's first National Security Council meeting, in January of 2001.
On October 17, 2004, Suskind's cover story in the New York Times Magazine, titled "Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," revealed that the President was planning to partially-privatize Social Security as his first initiative if re-elected — a disclosure that prompted controversy in the final two weeks of the campaign. The article, which also examined Bush's "faith-based" certainty, coined the term, "reality-based community," based on a conversation with a Bush aide who criticized Suskind and other people who "believe solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."
Suskind's investigative report, published in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, found that al-Qaeda officials were plotting to attack the New York subway station. Excerpts of the book were published in the June 18, 2006 issue of Time. The book, based on interviews with more than a hundred sources, found that U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 as driven by Vice President Cheney and his doctrine that "if there's a one percent chance" of weapons of mass destruction being given to terrorists "we need to treat it as a certainty." The doctrine, Suskind asserts, freed the administration from the dictates of evidence and allowed suspicion to be a guide for action.
Suskind attended the University of Virginia, lived on The Lawn during the 1980-1981 school year, and was the University's 2005 Valediction Speaker. He received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1983.
