Biography of Carl Cannon

Before joining the magazine in 1998, Mr. Cannon 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 Baltimore Sun to cover the 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 recently completed 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. He also serves as in-house writing coach at National Journal.    

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, Stanford's Hoover Institution, the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and numerous other academic audiences and business groups. 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 has written for numerous magazines other than National Journal, including The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Forbes, Reader's Digest, Brill's Content, Mother Jones, National Review and the Weekly Standard.    

A native of San Francisco, Carl graduated from the University of Colorado, majoring in journalism. He lives in Arlington, Va. with his wife Sharon and three children. His passions include thoroughbred racing, fly-fishing in Montana, and playing baseball in an adult hardball league.