The Paul H. Nitze
Scholars Program

Paul H. Nitze Senior Fellow 2006-07

David E. Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times

In his four visits to St. Mary's over the academic year, Mr. Sanger:

• discussed with a Nitze seminar what journalistic objectivity is and is not;
• discussed with the Leadership Tutorial developments in U.S. policy in Iraq and shared what he could of his experience in being called as witness in the trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, involving Valerie Plame being leaked as a CIA operative;
• conducted a "fronting exercise" with Nitze Scholars in order to illustrate how editors choose which stories appear on a newspaper's front page, bringing with him the actual candidate front page stories from the prior Saturday;
• gave a public talk about current issues in the news, and took questions.

David Sanger was born in 1960 in White Plains, New York, 25 miles north of Manhattan. He went to the public schools in White Plains and from there to Harvard, where he graduated with a B.A. in government (magna cum laude) in 1982.

From there his life as a journalist took an enviable trajectory. Immediately he began work at The New York Times and, 24 years later, is with it still. His earliest work was with the Business Day section of The Times where he wrote on the burgeoning computer industry and high-technology trade. From there he advanced to investigative work in Asia: he became the Times's correspondent (and, later, bureau chief) in Tokyo and went on to cover North Korea's secret nuclear weapons program.

He returned to the United States in 1994 and was made chief Washington economic correspondent, covering crises in Mexico and Asia. The Times named him a "senior writer" in 1999 and, later the same year, White House correspondent.

Twice Mr. Sanger has been part of investigative teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes for The Times. In 1987 it was for reporting on the causes behind the 1986 Challenger disaster at lift-off, and in 1999 it was for coverage of discussions in the Clinton administration over the control of exports to China.

In 2004 Mr. Sanger worked on a team that covered the Columbia disaster (over Texas), receiving a top award for deadline writing from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The previous year he had won Georgetown University's Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting in his coverage of the crises in Iraq and Korea. The year 2003 had also brought him two of the three annual prizes given by the White House Correspondents' Association: the Aldo Beckman Award, "for excellence in writing," praised the "six hard-hitting and beautifully written" stories on the Bush White House; the Merriman Smith Award ("for excellence in presidential news coverage") noted his "rich and textured explanation" of an advance copy of President Bush's National Security Strategy.

David Sanger is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan foreign policy organization based in New York and Washington, D.C. Members of the audience for tonight's lecture may have heard him twice weekly on The Times's radio station, WQXR, where he delivers "The Washington Report." He appears frequently on television: the Lehrer NewsHour, PBS's "Washington Week in Review," "Face the Nation," and Charlie Rose.