The Advocates on WJUP

Louis Howe and how he influence American politics-Julie Fenster

Wednesday, July 21, 2010, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is Julie M. Fenster, biographer and historian. Our subject is Louis McHenry Howe, and how he influenced the course of American history with his dedication and friendship with the Roosevelt’s.                                    

Julie M. Fenster is an author and historian who began her career at Automobile Quarterly, where her book Packard: The Pride won the Best Book award from the National Automotive Journalism Conference. The author of six additional books on a wide range of historical topics, she has written for American Heritage, the New York Times, and American History.

Her previous book, Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It, received the Anesthesia Foundation Award for best book of 2001. Fenster graduated from Colgate University and lives in upstate New York, where she drives her sports car on roads that trace the route of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race.She has starred in a TV commercial for Cheapbooks which was aired in early 2008. She is shown at a book signing for her work "Race of the Century." In 2003 she won The Anesthesia Foundation’s 2003 Book/Multimedia Education Award for Ether Day. In January 2006, she and co-author Douglas Brinkley released Parish Priest, a biography of Father Michael J. McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus..

She is also a regular contributor to American Heritage, Fenster has also written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She has appeared on NPR and C-Span, among others. Below is a list of her books

• Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It (2001)
• Mavericks, Miracles, and Medicine: The Pioneers Who Risked Their Lives to Bring Medicine into the Modern Age (2003)
• Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race (2006)
• The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President (2007)
• FDR's Shadow: Louis Howe, the Force That Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (2009)

The 2nd Amendment, Is It Out of Date?-Michael Shapiro

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, at 12:00 Noon, I will be hosting my show The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is defense lawyer, legal commentator, and former prosecutor, Michael Shapiro, of Carter, Ledyard, & Milburn. Our show is whether the 2^nd Amendment is outdated, not really relevant and should it be repealed”

Mr. Michael Shapiro is a long-time Scarsdale resident and noted criminal defense lawyer. Mr. Shapiro, who was raised in the Bronx, was educated at the City College of New York, where he received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude, and later earned his JD from New York University. He is currently a faculty member of the Cardozo Law School’s Intensive Advocacy Program and has been a frequent guest panelist at the Harvard Law School. He is now a partner with the prestigious Wall Street, New York law firm, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, which was established in 1854.  

Mr. Shapiro last appeared on The Advocates on August 4, 2010, : discussing The Supreme Court -Justices Owen Roberts to John Roberts- New Deal to Raw Deal- Is this the Most Conservative Court? http://advocates-wvox.com/2010/08/05/the-supreme-court-justices-owen-roberts-to-john-roberts-new-deal-to-raw-deal-is-this-the-most-conservative-court.aspx

He also appeared on August 26, 2009 and March 3^, 2009 discussing the following: Michael Shapiro talks about the Supreme Court and its New Justice http://advocates-wvox.com/2009/08/26/michael-shapiro-talks-about-the-supreme-court-and-its-new-justice.aspx and

Michael Shapiro discusses Bernard Madoff, the Violation of Trust, and Legal Redresshttp://advocates-wvox.com/2009/03/25/michael-shapiro-discusses-bernard-madoff-the-violation-of-trust-and-legal-redress.aspx

The 2^nd Amendment to the US Constitution states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Roberts Court and the Shift to the Right-Michael Shapiro

My guest today is Michael Shapiro, former NYC prosecutor, defense lawyer and commentator on the Supreme Court This program is the 3rd in a four part summer series on the law. Recent shows have featured Guy Fairstein and Legal Services of Hudson Valley, Amy Bach, author of Ordinary Injustice, today we will be discussing the five years of the Roberts’ Court and its dramatic shift to the right. In late August, the Advocates will focus the legal and tax implications of dynasty trusts on our democracy with Professor Ray Madoff of Boston College.

Mr. Michael Shapiro is a long-time Scarsdale resident and noted criminal defense lawyer. Mr. Shapiro, who was raised in the Bronx, was educated at the City College of New York, where he received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude, and later earned his JD from New York University. Michael started his legal career as a prosecutor, serving as a special assistant attorney general in the then newly established NY State Office of the Special Prosecutor for Nursing Homes, Health and Social Services.  He is currently a faculty member of the Cardozo Law School’s Intensive Advocacy Program and has been a frequent guest panelist at the Harvard Law School. He is now a partner with the prestigious Wall Street, New York law firm, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, which was established in 1854.  Mr. Shapiro has been a guest on The Advocates over the past few years and has brought his expertise regarding programs on the “Establishment Clause,” the future of conservatism, the implications of Bernard Madoff’s embezzlement, and the elevation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

The Banality of Evil, Eichmann- Deborah Lipstadt

Wednesday, June 15, 2011, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is Professor Deborah Lipstadt, author of The Eichmann Trial, and an internationally recognized expert on Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitic revisionist history.

Deborah E, Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies (1993), Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and the Department of Religion. Dr. Lipstadt's new book, The Eichmann Trial, published by Schocken/Nextbook Series in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, has been called by Publisher's Weekly, "a penetrating and authoritative dissection of a landmark case and its after effects."

Her book History On Trial: My Day In Court With a Holocaust Denier (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2005) is the story of her libel trial in London against David Irving who sued her for calling him a Holocaust denier and right wing extremist. The book won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award and was first runner up for the Koret Award. It received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews

The judge found David Irving to be a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, a racist, an anti-Semite, and a liar. Her legal battle with Irving lasted approximately six years. According to The New York Times, the trial "put an end to the pretense that Mr. Irving is anything but a self-promoting apologist for Hitler." In July 2001 the Court of Appeal resoundingly rejected Irving's attempt to appeal the judgment against him.

Her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault On Truth and Memory (Free Press/Macmillan, 1993) is the first full length study of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust. It was the subject of simultaneous front page reviews in The New York Times and the Washington Post. The book has been published in Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

At Emory she created the Institute for Jewish Studies and was its first director from 1998-2008. She directs the website known as HDOT [Holocaust Denial on Trial/ www.hdot.org] which, in addition to cataloging legal and evidentiary materials from David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt contains answers to frequent claims made by deniers. This section, Myths and Facts, received a grant from the Conference for Material Claims against Germany for the translation of the site into Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish. The site is frequently accessed in cities throughout Iran. Its seventh most visited country is Saudi Arabia.

Lipstadt was an historical consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and helped design the section of the Museum dedicated to the American Response to the Holocaust. She was appointed by President Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council on which she served two terms. She was a member of its Executive Committee of the Council and chaired the Educational Committee and Academic Committee of the Holocaust Museum. Dr. Lipstadt has been called upon by members of the United States Congress to consult on political responses to Holocaust denial. From 1996 through 1999 she served as a member of the United States State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. In this capacity she, together with a small group of leaders and scholars, advised Secretary of State Madeline Albright on matters of religious persecution abroad. In 2005 she was asked by President George W. Bush to be part of a small delegation which represented the White House at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.

On April 11, 2011, the 50th anniversary of the start of the Eichmann Trial, Dr. Lipstadt gave a public address at the State Department on the impact of the trial.

Dr. Lipstadt has also written Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (Free Press/MacMillan, 1986, 1993). The book, an examination of how the American press covered the news of the persecution of European Jewry between the years 1933 and 1945, addresses the question "what did the American public know and when did they know it?"

In 2009 she was in residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as the Burton Resnick Invitational Scholar in Anti-Semitism.

Professor Lipstadt is frequently called upon by the media to comment on a variety of matters. She has appeared Good Morning America, NPR's Fresh Air, the BBC, Charlie Rose Show, and is a frequent contributor to and is widely quoted in a variety of newspapers and journals including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington Post, The New York Times and The Forward.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs awarded her its highest honor, the Albert D. Chernin Award. The Chernin Award is presented annually to "an American Jew whose work best exemplifies the social justice imperatives of Judaism, Jewish history and the protection of the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment." Previous winners included Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Professor Alan Dershowitz.

In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Jewish Research, the oldest organization of Judaic scholars in North America. She serves as a non-fiction judge for the Sami Rohr Book Prize. This 100,000 dollar award is given to the best new author of non-fiction books on Jewish topics.

She has received numerous teaching awards including Emory's student government association's award for being the teacher most likely to motivate students to learn about new and unfamiliar topics and the Emory Williams award, for her courses on modern Jewish and Holocaust studies. Given to Emory's outstanding teachers, the Williams award is based on nominations by alumni of the professor who has had the greatest impact on them.

She has taught at UCLA and Occidental College in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from City College of New York (1969) and her M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) from Brandeis University.

She has received Honorary Doctorates from Ohio Wesleyan, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Yeshiva University, Bar Ilan University, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College. The Forward named her number two on its list of the "Forward Fifty": the fifty top Jewish newsmakers for the year 2000. In May 2011 she will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Masters and Commander- The Leaders that Won WWII-Andrew Roberts

On Wednesday, August 11, 2010, at 12:00 Noon, I will be hosting my show The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is the distinguished author Andrew Roberts. The subject is WWII strategy, starring FDR, Winston Churchill, General George C, Marshall and Field Marshall Alan Brooke.                                                                  

Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honors degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary senior scholar. His biography of Neville Chamberlain's and Winston Churchill's foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox was published in 1991, to be followed by the controversial, but no less well-received Eminent Churchillians in 1994. As well as appearing regularly on British television and radio, Roberts writes for The Sunday Telegraph and reviews history books and biography for that newspaper as well as The Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph.

In 1999 he published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, the authorized biography of the Victorian prime minister the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. In September 2001 Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the
relationship between the two great generals, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, which coincided with Roberts's four-part BBC2 history series.

Roberts holds an honorary doctorate from Westminster College, Missouri. He has two children, Henry, who was born in 1997 and Cassia, who was born in 1999, who live in Edinburgh. He lives in Belgravia in London with his wife, Susan Gilchrist, the senior partner of the corporate communications firm Brunswick Group and a Governor of the Southbank Centre.

In 2005 Roberts published 'Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble', which was published in America as 'Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe'. The publication of 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900' brought him an invitation to the White House in February 2007, where he delivered the prestigious White House Lecture.

Masters and Commanders, which was published in 2008, won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award, both of Britain’s two top military history prizes. The Storm of War was published in August 2009 which reached No.2 on The Sunday Times bestseller list and has also been shortlisted for the British Army Military Book Award for 2010.

Roberts is interested in public policy and sits on the boards or advisory councils of a number of think-tanks and pressure groups. He is a Director of the Harry Guggenheim Foundation in New York, a founder member of Jose Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Committee, and in 2010 chaired the Hessell-Tiltman Award for Non-Fiction.

Roberts is a judge on the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Prize, chaired the Conservative Party's Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK). He is a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the Roberts Foundation. More information about him can be found in Who's Who.

The Storm of War- a history of WW II- Andrew Roberts

Wednesday, May 18, 2011, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is Andrews Roberts, historian and author of The Storm of War, a new history of the Second World War. He was previously a guest on The Advocates on August 18, 2010.

Andrew Roberts is the author of the biography of Neville Chamberlain's and Winston Churchill's foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, entitled The Holy Fox, which was published in 1991. This work was followed by Eminent Churchillians, in 1994, a collection of essays about friends and enemies of Churchill. A large part of the book is an attack on Lord Mountbatten of Burma and other prominent members of the elite.

In 1999, he published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, the authorized biography of the Victorian prime minister the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. In September 2001, Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the relationship between the two great generals, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and was the subject of the lead review in all but one of Britain's national newspapers.

In 2003, the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, coincided with Roberts's four-part BBC2 history series. In the book, which addresses the leadership techniques of Hitler and Churchill, he delivered a rebuttal to many of the assertions made by Clive Ponting and Christopher Hitchens concerning Churchill.

Also in 2003, he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2004, he edited What Might Have Been, a collection of twelve "What If?" essays written by distinguished historians, including Antonia Fraser, Norman Stone, Amanda Foreman, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Conrad Black, and Anne Somerset. In 2005, he published Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble, which was published in America as Waterloo: The Battle for Modern Europe.

His A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, a sequel to the four volume work of Churchill, was published in September 2006 and won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Book Award. Masters and Commanders describes how four titanic figures shaped the grand strategy of the West during the Second World War. It was published in November, 2008 and won the International Churchill Society Book Award and was shortlisted for two other military history book prizes. Under his leadership, The Art of War is a two-volume chronological survey of the greatest military commanders in history. It was compiled by a team of historians, including Robin Lane Fox, Tom Holland, John Julius Norwich, Jonathan Sumption and Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

The Storm of War was published in August 2009 and as a best seller it reached number two in The London Sunday Times bestseller list. The book was awarded British Army Military Book of the Year 2010

He has appeared on US television during royal funerals and weddings. He first came to prominence in the USA as an expert on the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and he was later, in a similar role, during the CNN broadcast of the death of the Queen Mother. He also served as CNN’s commentator on the weddings of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

In Britain in 2003, he presented The Secrets of Leadership, a four-part history series on BBC2 about the secrets of leadership which looked at the different leadership styles of Churchill, Hitler, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King He is a Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in New York, a founder member of José Maria Aznar’s Friends of Israel Initiative, and in 2010 chaired the Hessell-Tiltman Award for Non-Fiction.

He is also a judge for the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography Prize. He chaired the Conservative Party's Advisory Panel on the Teaching of History in Schools in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Napoleonic Institute and an Honorary Member of the International Churchill Society (UK). He is a Trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and of the Roberts Foundation.

Andrew Roberts was born in London, England He earned his BA degree in Modern History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In 2011 he was awarded a doctorate by Cambridge University.

He began his post-graduate career in corporate finance as an investment banker and private company director with the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., where he worked from 1985 to 1988.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt- A Partnership- Hazel Rowley

Wednesday, January 19, 2011, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is author Hazel Rowley, and our subject is her book Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.   

Hazel Rowley, brought up in England and Australia, lives in New York City. Her new book, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: An Extraordinary Marriage, is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

She moved to Paris for 18 months to write Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultous Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Harper Collins, New York, in 2005. The book has been translated into over a dozen languages, and has garnered considerable international acclaim — and controversy! It was a Washington Post Best Book for 2005. In Brazil it was a bestseller, and in France the literary magazine Lire named it "the best literary essay of 2006."

Rowley wrote Richard Wright: The Life and Times while she was affiliated with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro American Studies at Harvard. Published by Henry Holt in August 2001, the book had cover reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post and was listed among the 2001 Washington Post Book World Raves. It was re-issued by Chicago University Press in March 2008.                               

Christina Stead: A Biography was published by Heinemann, Australia, in 1993, where it won the 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Published by Henry Holt in the US and Secker & Warburg in the UK, it was named as a New York Times Notable Book. The book was re-issued in 2007 by Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, Australia.

Hazel Rowley's essays have appeared four times in The Best Australian Essays. (See her essay "Mockingbird Country" on Harper Lee). Her essay "Beauvoir, Brazil, and 'Christina T'" was published in Book Forum, in April/May 2007. Back in December 1996, she mourned the dramatic changes in tertiary education in an article published in The Australian, called "Universities are losing on points." She has published articles in Partisan Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Antioch Review, Contemporary Literature, Prose Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Southerly and Westerly, and has reviewed books for The Times Literary Supplement (UK), The London Times Higher Education Supplement, Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Nation, and L.A. Times. Hazel Rowley was awarded her BA (First Class) and PhD from the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

A passionate speaker, she has appeared at numerous book festivals and literary events in the United States, Canada, the UK, France, and Australia. Her recent speaking engagements include the Athenaeum (Boston), the Smithsonian (Washington), the New York Society Library, the Alliance Francaise, Chicago, and the Sydney Writers' Festival. She is currently on a nationwide book tour for Franklin and Eleanor.

The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices- Noah Feldman

Wednesday, December 1, 2010, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is Mr. Professor Noah Feldman, author of Scorpions, which tells the story of the FDR Court and four of its outstanding judges; Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Robert Henry Jackson, and William O. Douglas.                              

Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Bemis Professor of law at Harvard Law School, he is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Feldman was Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.  He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.  In 2004 he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center.  In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution.   From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.  Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University in 1994. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of five books: Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve, forthcoming November 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press, 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).          

                                            

 

Refugees and Rescue-FDR and James G. McDonald- Richard Breitman

On Wednesday, September 15, 2010, at 12:00 Noon, I will be hosting my show The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM, my guest is historian Richard Breitman. Our program explores new perspectives regarding FDR’s commonly published views and actions regarding European Jewish refugees through the writings and views of James G. McDonald, FDR’s advisor on refugees.                                          

Richard Breitman is the author or co-author of nine books and many articles in German history, U. S. history, and the Holocaust.  His book The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991) won the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History and was translated into five languages.  Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), also has appeared in five foreign languages.  His most recent books are editions of the diaries of James G. McDonald (League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1933-35, and chairman of President Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, 1938-1945) in a series published by Indiana University Press.

He received his B.A. at Yale in 1969, graduating summa cum laude and with highest distinction in history and political science.  He received his M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from Harvard University.  Breitman teaches at American University and is editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  He served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which helped to bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of U.S. government records under a 1998 law.

 

Who Stole the American Dream- Hedrick Smith

Wednesday, October 17, 2012, at 12:00 am, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460 AM,  my guest is the former long-time, Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for the New York Times, Hedrick Smith, author of Who Stole the American Dream?  We will discuss his views on what happened to America, Wall Street, the Middle Class and our future.

Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent, is one of America's most distinguished journalists. He has covered Washington and world capitals for The New York Times, authored several best-selling books and created 20 award-winning PBS prime time specials and miniseries on Washington's power game, Soviet perestroika, the global economy, education reform, health care, teen violence, terrorism and Wall Street.

After September 11th, Mr. Smith went Inside the Terror Network with PBS Frontline to show how Al Qaeda's conspirators organized their attack and how the U.S. missed chances to catch them. He has since led Frontline investigative reports, Bigger Than Enron, The Wall Street Fix, Tax Me If You Can, Is Wal-Mart Good for America? and Can You Afford to Retire? These programs probed accounting scandals, conflicts on Wall Street, global trade, corporate fraud, the rising crisis in retirement funding, and their implications for American investors, workers and retirees. The Wall Street Fix won a prestigious Emmy for documentaries on business.

For 26 years, Mr. Smith served as a correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the American South. In 1971, as chief diplomatic correspondent, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. From 1976-1988, he was The New York Times Washington bureau chief and chief correspondent.

Hedrick Smith has published several national best-selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988), The New Russians (1990) and Rethinking America (1995). He has co-authored several other books. His newspaper career began with The Greenville (S.C.) News. After completing his B.A. at Williams College and doing graduate work at Oxford University, he worked for Universal Press International in Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta, 1959-62, and for The New York Times, 1962-88. He was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1969-70.

Mr. Smith began creating documentaries for PBS in 1989 with an adaptation from his best-selling book, The Power Game. His second documentary series, Inside Gorbachev's USSR, broadcast on PBS in 1990, built on his experience as Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York Times in the 1970s, on his best selling book, The Russians, and on his subsequent coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. Inside Gorbachev's USSR won the duPont-Columbia grand prize in 1991 for the most outstanding public affairs production on U.S. television.

Mr. Smith's PBS miniseries, the two-hour prime time special, Making Schools Work, which broadcast in 2005, showed dramatic and surprising improvements in educational achievement among students from poor neighborhoods in previously low-performing schools. In two previous series, Challenge to America in 1994 and Surviving the Bottom Line in 1998, Hedrick Smith Productions compared American public schools and students with those in Germany, Japan and China, to see which nations and systems are gaining competitive advantage in the 21st century. By identifying school models and strategies that are generating large-scale success - lifting the performance of roughly two million low income and minority students - offers examples that have enormous significance for American public education across the country.

In his documentaries, Mr. Smith's work ranges widely with enduring impact and broad reach. His programs on Washington politics were not only popular but are now widely used in college and university courses. Before the 2000 election, PBS devoted an entire prime time evening to his pre-election special on U.S. health care, Critical Condition with Hedrick Smith, which was nominated for an Emmy. He has produced two four-hour miniseries on the impact of the global economy on the U.S. middle class, Challenge to America and Surviving the Bottom Line. For Black History month, he gave PBS viewers Duke Ellington's Washington. A year later, he created Rediscovering Dave Brubeck, an intimate portrait of the legendary jazz pianist.

In September 1999, after deadly violence at several U.S. public schools, Smith produced a three-hour prime time special, Seeking Solutions, that broke new ground by showing effective grass roots responses in six American communities to teen violence, gangs, street crime and hate crime. The program won the 1999 public service award for television from Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism society.

 Almost all of Hedrick Smith's productions have won awards from film festivals and competitions. The Power Game (1989), won the international RIAS prize as well as a CINE Golden Eagle, and his inner city documentary, Across the River (1995), about community building in crime-plagued neighborhoods of Washington, won the prestigious Sidney Hillman Award, among others. Five other documentaries have won CINE Golden Eagle Awards and others have brought home honors from film festivals.

PBS viewers saw Mr. Smith for 25 years as a principal panelist on Washington Week in Review and have also seen him as a special correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Mr. Smith has received six honorary doctorate degrees and has spoken at several college commencements. He was born July 9, 1933 in Kilmacolm, Scotland. He was educated at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut and at Williams College, and did graduate work at Oxford University.