Ron Suskind

Ronald Steven Suskind (born November 20, 1959) is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker.

In 1983 he received a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

The couple married in 1988.

Cornelia is the granddaughter of Democratic Representative Martin J. Kennedy.

In 1990, Suskind went to The Wall Street Journal, and became senior national affairs reporter in 1993.

He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000, where he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for articles that became the starting point for his first book, A Hope in the Unseen.

His other books include The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, Confidence Men, and his memoir Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, from which he made an Emmy Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated feature documentary.

Suskind has written about the George W. Bush administration, the Barack Obama administration, and related issues of the United States' use of power.

Suskind was born in Kingston, New York, to a Jewish family.

He is the son of Shirley Berney and Walter B. Suskind, and a second cousin of producer David Susskind.

He grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from Concord High School, after which he attended the University of Virginia.

In 1995, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for two articles on Cedric Jennings, a student at inner-city Ballou High School in Washington, D.C. who wanted to attend MIT.

In 1995 Suskind wrote a series of articles on the struggles of inner-city honors students in Washington, D.C, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Parts of these articles were used in his first book, A Hope in the Unseen (Doubleday/Broadway, 1998).

The story chronicles the two-year journey of Cedric L. Jennings, an honor student who aspires to escape his blighted D.C. upbringing by going to an Ivy League university.

The book was chosen by The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Monthly and Booklist as one of the best books of the year.

The New York Times Book Review called it an "extraordinary, formula-shattering book".

David Halberstam called it a "beautiful book of a heroic American struggle."

The book has been a selection in college courses on American culture, education, sociology and creative writing, and has been a required reading for incoming freshmen at some universities.

Suskind left the Journal in 2000.

Suskind has written six books, and he has published in such periodicals as Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

In 2001 and 2002, he was a contributor to "Life 360," a joint production of ABC and PBS.

In 2002, Suskind wrote two articles in Esquire on the workings of the George W. Bush White House.

The first article, in June 2002, focused on presidential adviser Karen Hughes.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said that the pragmatic Hughes was "the beauty to Karl's beast", referring to Bush's advisor Karl Rove.

According to Card, her resignation signified a political shift in the administration further to the right.

Suskind's second Esquire story about Rove, in December 2002, carried the comments and a long memo from Bush's former head of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community initiatives John DiIulio, an official who left the White House and spoke about his experiences.

DiIulio criticized the Bush administration for having "no policy apparatus" and fixating on political calculation, and was quoted as saying "it's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," a comment he then explained in a 3,000-word, on-the-record memo to Suskind about his time in the administration.

DiIulio later attempted to recant some of his characterizations.

In 2004, he discussed his book The Price of Loyalty on CBS's 60 Minutes.

Between 2004 and 2008, he made appearances on Frontline, the PBS series.

An October 2004 cover story by Suskind in the New York Times Magazine stated that the president was planning to partially privatize Social Security as his first initiative if re-elected—a disclosure that prompted controversy in the final two weeks of the campaign.

In the article, Suskind quoted an unnamed advisor to Bush (later identified as someone who "seems to have been" Rove) as saying that

"guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

In 2006 he discussed The One Percent Doctrine on The Colbert Report, and in 2008 he discussed The Way of the World on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and again appeared on the show when his 2011 book, Confidence Men, was published.

He has also appeared on NBC's Today Show, ABC's Nightline and PBS's Charlie Rose.

In the spring of 2012, Suskind was the A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

At the Shorenstein Center he conducted four workshops for students about the process of reporting and writing titled, "Truth and Consequences: Crafting Powerful Narratives in the Age of Message."

Suskind has two sons with his wife, Cornelia Anne Kennedy Suskind.

On May 13, 2014, he appeared on The Daily Show to discuss his book Life, Animated, the real-life story of his autistic son, Owen Suskind, and "his irrepressible wife," Cornelia.