A View from Washington
Drawing from today's top news stories, presidential expert Tom DeFrank speaks about President Obama's leadership and offers predictions for his administration.
The 2008 Presidential campaign was the eleventh he has covered in 42 years as a Washington reporter. He has covered the resignation of one President, the impeachment of a second, and was an eyewitness to two assassination attempts against a third. He has traveled to all 50 states and 48 countries as a White House reporter and is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association.
DeFrank was Newsweek's senior White House correspondent for a quarter century and also served as deputy chief of the magazine's Washington bureau for twelve years. Assigned to the White House beat since 1970, DeFrank has covered eight Presidents: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama.
He is the only newsmagazine correspondent to win both of the White House Correspondents' Association awards for distinguished Presidential reporting. He has also shared in several other reporting awards, including the Overseas Press Club's award for his reporting of the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev summit and Newsweek's National Magazine Award for the 1992 Presidential campaign.
He has appeared on several public affairs television programs, including Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Larry King Live, The Beltway Boys, Washington Week in Review, Fox News, Charlie Rose, Fox & Friends and C-SPAN.
His book on 30 years of private conversations with President Ford, Write it When I'm Gone, published in November 2007, was a New York Times and Washington Post bestseller. He is also the co-author of Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, the 1996 best-selling memoir of controversial Republican political consultant Ed Rollins. He also co-authored The Politics of Diplomacy, the memoirs of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and Quest for the Presidency 1992, Newsweek's critically-acclaimed, behind-the-scenes look at the Clinton-Bush election, published in 1994.
DeFrank has reported on congressional and military affairs, and in 1973 covered the return of U.S. prisoners of war from Vietnam at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. He also reported extensively on the Persian Gulf War, traveling to Saudi Arabia with President Bush in November 1990 and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell in December 1990.
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