A Quick Résumé

I am an "old media" type -- 40-plus years as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, TV and books -- who is trying to find my way in this "new media" world. I have a hopeful notion that the Internet can sustain continuing conversations -- connections that leap over the usual obstacles and boundaries, that educate us on both ends and maybe even add something to the new political associations that are already fast developing from Internet traffic. I have spent my adult life tramping around the United States and (to a lesser degree) the world as an inquiring reporter, encountering people of every station from impoverished peasants to important financiers and statesmen. On the whole, this experience has confirmed my inherited conviction that people are capable everywhere in the world and most try to do the best they can, given their circumstances. Americans in particular are a gorgeously diverse and interesting people, mostly decent and serious about life, funny and open, inventive and generous, whatever their situations.

I am national affairs correspondent for The Nation, the largest and oldest of America's political weeklies. I live and work in Washington DC (office address: 1025 Connecticut Avenue NW #205, Washington DC 20036). My wife Linda Furry Greider is also a magazine writer; we have been married for 42 years (she was a child bride). Our children, their spouses and our four grandchildren live in New York City. I was raised in Wyoming, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, and educated in public schools there and at Princeton University (1958).

My new book (September 2003 from Simon & Schuster) is The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to A Moral Economy. It describes why American capitalism produces so much human discontent and social injury alongside the abundance. It explains how Americans can exert decisive influence to change the economic system's operating values and power structure, to disarm capitalism's destructive collisions and its collateral consequences for people and nation. Many smart citizens are already at work on profound reforms.

My career:

I am a former assistant managing editor for national news at the Washington Post, where I was a national correspondent and later Sunday columnist for nearly 15 years. My first job (after the Army) was with the Wheaton Daily Journal in Wheaton, Illinois, where I met Linda. We moved next to the Louisville Times in Louisville, Kentucky, where our children were born. The Times and Courier Journal sent us to Washington where I was correspondent for both until joining the Washington Post.. We have lived in the nation's capital since 1966, but in recent years spend as much time as we can in Vermont where we have an old mountainside farm, house and garden and woods.

Before joining The Nation, I wrote a regular column and features for Rolling Stone magazine from the early 1980s to 1999. I have served as on-air correspondent for six television documentaries for Frontline on PBS. One of these, "Return to Beirut," won an Emmy in 1985.

Major books:

One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, 1997, S&S. Based on reporting on three continents, it explores the drama of industrial revolution and globalization in human terms, from peasants becoming industrial workers to the highest realms of global finance. It explains the underlying economic and political vulnerabilities that threaten the global system, but also the potential for a new more humane internationalism that serves both rich and poor alike. Published in UK, Germany, Brazil, Greece and China.

Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, 1992, S&S. A close-in account of how politics and representative self-government have decayed at the national level, based on my many years of Washington reporting. Published in Japan, 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, 1987, S&S, remains the definitive popular study of America's central bank and how Chairman Paul Volcker steered the U.S. economy through the volatile 1980s. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace, 1998, PublicAffairs. A tour of the military-industrial complex -- the troops and the factories -- that explained post-Cold War dilemmas that remain unresolved.

The Education of David Stockman and Other Americans, 1982, Dutton, a controversial account of Reaganomics that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and was based on my long-running interviews with Reagan's budget director. It revealed the chaos and illusions of Reagan's fiscal policy and the broken promises in his legislative triumphs, foreshadowing the massive federal deficts that persisted for nearly two decades.