Backgrounder: Ron Suskind
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind wants you to know the ugly truths driving the war on terror. In his new book, The One Percent Doctrine (Simon and Schuster), Suskind delves into the Bush administration’s inner workings and exposes Dick Cheney’s doctrine for evaluating terrorist threats: Those with even a one percent chance of materializing must be treated as real risks. Suskind says this led, most notably, to the alarm surrounding weapons of mass destruction.
Suskind told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in July 2006 that how we respond to these threats frames much of the debate about the war on terror. “In many cases, the vice president is clearly saying suspicion will be a sufficient threshold for action,” he told the Sentinel. “Some folks say, what choice does he have? Other folks say the excesses created by this have essentially multiplied our problems. And that is really the debate.”
A Washington D.C. based journalist, Suskind was born in 1959 in Kingston, N.Y. He earned his master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and began his career in 1983 as a news assistant and interim reporter for The New York Times, working for the metro desk and covering national business. In 1985, he became a staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, and by 1988 was editor of Boston Business magazine. He has published two other books and was the senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000.
Suskind won a 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his series in the Wall Street Journal about an inner-city student from Washington D.C. who went on to study at Brown University. He later expanded the series into a book, A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (1998, Broadway), following the student for two years.
In 2004, his book on treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and the Bush administration, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (Simon and Schuster), revealed that the war in Iraq was planned in January 2001 during Bush’s first National Security Council meeting. The same year, he wrote a New York Times Magazine cover story, “Without a Doubt,” examining how Bush’s faith-based principals have shaped his presidency.
Suskind told Salon.com in an October 2004 interview that there’s been a recent attempt in America to discredit journalists’ work.
“I’ve been a reporter for more than 20 years, and I grew up in an era when there was a justified respect for what journalists of all political affiliations did, which is act as honest brokers,” he told Salon. “It is part of our professional creed to be open to searching for the modest truths we’re able to know in life and to render them effectively in what we write and what we say.”
SOURCES
“1995 Pulitzer Prizes - Feature Writing, Biography.” Pulitzer.org http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1995/feature-writing/bio/
Boehlert, Eric. “Reality Based Reporting.” Salon.com. 20 Oct. 2004.
“Bold Type: Interview with Ron Suskind and Cedric Jennings.” Randomhouse.com http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0798/suskind/interview.html
Glauber, Bill. “Q&A: Suskind on how analysis and action split.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. 16 July 2006.
“Ron Suskind: Author, Journalist, Documentarian.” 2004. http://www.ronsuskind.com/about/
“Ron Suskind.” Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Suskind
“Ron Suskind.” The Notable Names Database. 2006.
“The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the education of Paul O’Neill.” Wikipedia.org Aug. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_Of_Loyalty