Ron Suskind

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Ron Suskind is an American journalist and writer. A former Wall Street Journal reporter (1993-2000), he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995.

[edit] Career

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.

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 (1998). The novelistic nonfiction work follows the three-year path of a religious African-American student from a blighted D.C. high school to Brown University. It became a favorite in book clubs and was critically acclaimed as reframing national debates on race and education.

Suskind left the Wall Street Journal in 2000 as the paper's senior national affairs reporter.

In 2002 he wrote two stories in Esquire that marked some of the first stories to show the inner workings of the Bush White House. The first one was 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 right. Suskind's second Esquire story (December 2002) about Rove carried the comments and a long memo from Bush's former head of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community initiatives John DiIulio, the first top official to leave the White House and speak candidly about his experiences. DiIulio criticized the Bush administration for having "no policy apparatus" and fixating on political calculation, and was quoted as saying "it's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis", although later recant that characterization.

On January 13, 2004, his book on former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill and the Bush administration—The Price of Loyalty was published, revealing 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 the U.S. occupation of Iraq was planned from Bush's first U.S. National Security Council meeting in January 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" certainly popularized 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, claimed that al-Qaeda leaders were plotting to attack the New York City Subway. 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 Dick 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.