About

Hendrik (Rick) Hertzberg (b. 1943) is an American liberal journalist, best known as a longtime political commentator and staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where he has also served as executive editor. He was a San Francisco correspondent for Newsweek at the dawn of Hippiedom; a junior officer (and conscientious objector) in the Vietnam-era U.S. Navy; President Jimmy Carter’s chief White House speechwriter; and (twice) editor of The New Republic. His books include ¡Obámanos! The Rise of a New Political Era and Politics: Observations & Arguments. A Harvard graduate, Hertzberg has been a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics and its Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, as well as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is a three-time winner of (and six-time finalist for) the National Magazine Award.

Hertzberg lives in New York City and upstate with his wife, Virginia Cannon, a Rolling Stone, Nation, and Vanity Fair alumna who is the opinion editor of The New Yorker magazine and website. Their son, Wolf, is a student at the University of Chicago.

Illustration by Stanley Chow.

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