Carl Cannon

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for Reader's Digest, the largest-circulating magazine in the United States, and a contributing editor for National Journal, Washington's authoritative, non-partisan weekly journal on politics and government.  Before joining The Digest in December of 2007, Mr. Cannon covered the White House for 15 years, first for The Baltimore Sun and then for National Journal. Before that, he worked for six newspapers over a 20-year span. Prior to coming to Washington in the first Reagan term, he covered police, courts, local and statewide politics, education, and race relations at newspapers in Virginia, Georgia and California.    

In California, Mr. Cannon's reporting on a 1937 Los Angeles murder helped secure a pardon based on innocence for the man wrongfully convicted, then-80-year-old Pete Pianezzi. While on vacation in San Francisco in 1989 to see the Bay Area World Series, Mr. Cannon found himself covering the Loma Prieta earthquake instead of watching baseball and was a member of the San Jose Mercury News staff awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that coverage.    

He has covered every presidential campaign and political convention since 1984, and was hired in 1993 by The Sun to cover Bill Clinton's White House. He remained on the beat after moving to National Journal in 1998. The following year, he was honored for his White House coverage by winning the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting of the Presidency. Mr. Cannon served two terms on the board of the White House Correspondents Association in which he revamped the organization's scholarship program. He capped that service in 2004 as president of the White House Correspondents Association. In 2006, he won the Aldo Beckman Award for excellence in presidential reporting.

Carl has participated in presidency conferences at Princeton and the University of London, and has lectured on journalism and politics at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, and to numerous other academic audiences and business groups. He has been Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He spent the spring semester of 2007 as a fellow-in-residence at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. School Government. He is a contributing editor on the Bush presidency for AmericanPresident.org, the teaching website on the presidency operated by UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs.    

He has been a regular contributor to National Public Radio and wrote the presidency column for George magazine. He is a co-author of Boy Genius, a biography of White House aide Karl Rove, reissued earlier this year to reflect the 2004 elections. Mr. Cannon also wrote The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War, a 2003 book exploring how presidents and other American leaders have employed the language of the Declaration of Independence in times of national crisis. He wrote a chapter for a 2006 book published by the Brookings Institution titled Red and Blue Nation? Volume I: Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics. And he is the co-author, along with his father (and acclaimed Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon) of a new book, Reagan's Disciple: George W. Bush's Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy, published in February 2008.

Carl has written for numerous magazines other than Reader's Digest and National Journal, including The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Forbes, Reader's Digest, Brill's Content, Mother Jones, National Review and the Weekly Standard. His January 2007 Atlantic Monthly cover story: Why President's Lie was reprinted in the Best American Political Writing, 2007.