Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, and is the magazine’s chief political commentator. Hertzberg originally joined The New Yorker in 1969 after serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy. He left after the 1976 Presidential election and served as President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter from 1979 until 1981. From 1981 until 1992 he was associated with The New Republic and served two terms as its editor. During his second stint as editor, between 1988 and 1992, The New Republic won three National Magazine Awards, including back-to-back awards for General Excellence. In 1992, he returned to The New Yorker. He is the author of Politics: Observations & Arguments (2004). In 2006, his Comment essays won a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Hertzberg lives in New York City.
Visit Hendrik Hertzberg's blog for The New Yorker
Read the Harvard Magazine profile of Hendrik Hertzberg
Read the New York Newsday review of Politics: Observations & Arguments
Read The New York Times review of Politics: Observations & Arguments
BOOK
Politics: Observations and Arguments
Imagine if the Rolling Stones were just now releasing its first greatest hits album, and you'll have some idea of how long overdue, and highly anticipated, Politics is. Here are Hendrik Hertzberg's most significant and hilarious and devastating and infuriating dispatches from the American scene-a scene he has chronicled for four decades with an uncanny blend of moral seriousness, high spirits, and perfect rhetorical pitch. Politics is at once the story of American life from LBJ to GWB and a testament to the power of the written word in the right hands. In those hands, everything seems like politics, and politics has never seemed more interesting.
Hertzberg breaks down American politics into component parts-campaigns, debates, rhetoric, the media, wars (cultural, countercultural, and real), high crimes and misdemeanors, the right, and more-and draws the choicest, most telling pieces from his body of work to illuminate each, beginning each section with a new piece of writing framing the subject at hand. Politics 101 from the master, Politics is also an immensely rich and entertaining mosaic of American life from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s-a ride through recent American history with one of the most insightful and engaging guides imaginable.