Haynes Bonner Johnson (born July 9, 1931 in New York City) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author, and TV analyst. He has reported on most of the major news stories of the last half-century and is widely regarded as one of the nation's top political commentators.
He began his newspaper career in 1956 as a reporter for the Wilmington (Delaware) News-Journal. In 1957, Johnson joined the Washington Evening Star where he worked for 12 years, variously as a reporter, copy editor, night city editor and national reporter. He joined The Washington Post in 1969, serving first as a National correspondent, as a special assignment correspondent at home and abroad, then as the paper's Assistant Managing Editor and finally, as a national affairs columnist.
Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished national reporting in 1966 for his coverage of the civil rights crisis in Selma, Alabama. The award marked the first time in Pulitzer Prize history that a father and son both received awards for reporting; his father, Malcolm Johnson, won in 1949 for the New York Sun series, "Crime on the Waterfront," which was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film, On the Waterfront.
He is the author or editor of sixteen books, five of them best-sellers, including his most recent work, co-authored with Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz, The Battle for America: 2008.
Johnson was born in New York City. He earned his bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri in 1952 and his Master's in American History from the University of Wisconsin in 1956. Johnson served in the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant in artillery during the Korean War. He has held academic appointments at Duke, Princeton, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University and since 1998, has served as the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland.[1][2]