About:

Robert G. Kaiser retired from The Washington Post early in 2014 after a career on the paper that spanned half a century. He first joined the Post in 1963 as a summer intern while still a college student. He has served as a special correspondent in London from 1964 to 1967, a reporter on the city desk in Washington from 1967 to 1969, and foreign correspondent in Saigon from 1969 to 1970 and Moscow from 1971 to 1974. He returned to the national staff in Washington and worked as a reporter for seven years, covering labor, the U.S. Senate, the 1980 presidential campaign, and the first Reagan administration. In 1982, Kaiser became associate editor of the Post and editor of “Outlook,” a Sunday section of commentary and opinion. He also wrote a column for the section. From 1985 to 1990, he was assistant managing editor for national news. From 1990 to 1991, he was deputy managing editor, and from 1991 to 1998 served as the paper’s managing editor. He began his current assignment in September 1998. In the 2010-2011 academic year, Kaiser was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington.

Kaiser is the author or coauthor of eight books: Cold Winter, Cold War; Russia, The People and the Power; Great American Dreams with Jon Lowell; Russia from the Inside with Hannah Jopling Kaiser; Why Gorbachev Happened; The News About The News; American Journalism in Peril with Leonard Downie Jr.; So Damn Much Money, The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Govermment; and Act of Congress, How America’s Essential Institution Works, And How It Doesn’t. The News About The News won Harvard University’s Goldsmith prize for the best book of 2002 on politics and the news media. Kaiser’s work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Esquire, Foreign Affairs, and many other publications. He has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has appeared often on television, on Meet the Press, the Today show, and other programs. His dispatches from Moscow won the Overseas Press Club award for best foreign correspondence of the year in 1975. In 2003, he won the National Press Club prize for best diplomatic reporting of the year. Kaiser graduated from Yale College. He received a masters degree from the London School of Economics.