Sidney Blumenthal | |
---|---|
![]() Blumenthal in 2006 | |
Senior Advisor to the President | |
In office August 19, 1997 – January 20, 2001 Serving with Doug Sosnik, Joel Johnson | |
President | Bill Clinton |
Preceded by | George Stephanopoulos |
Succeeded by | Karl Rove |
Personal details | |
Born | Sidney Stone Blumenthal November 6, 1948 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
Political party | Democratic |
Spouse |
Jacqueline Jordan (m. 1976) |
Children | 2, including Max |
Education | Brandeis University (BA) |
Sidney Stone Blumenthal (born November 6, 1948) is an American journalist, political operative, and Lincoln scholar. A former aide to President Bill Clinton, he is a long-time confidant[1] of Hillary Clinton and was formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation.[2] As a journalist, Blumenthal wrote about American politics and foreign policy. He is also the author of a multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. Three books of the planned five-volume series have already been published: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel, and All the Powers of Earth. Subsequent volumes were planned for later.[3][4]
Blumenthal has written for publications such as The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, for whom he served for a time as the magazine's Washington correspondent, and, was, briefly, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Salon. He is a regular contributor to the openDemocracy website and is a regular columnist for The Guardian.[5] After 2000, he wrote several essays critical of the administration of George W. Bush.[6][7][8][9][10]
Over time, Blumenthal was viewed as a new type of journalist who eroded the divide between independent journalism and partisan journalism: "As the connection between journalists and politicians is umbilical in Washington, Blumenthal's political problem, in part, is journalistic," reporter Michael Powell wrote of him in a profile in The Washington Post: "His is a type found far more often on the right in Washington, a partisan warrior who takes a critically sympathetic stance not just toward his issues but his chosen political party as well. Even as a writer at The Washington Post, where Blumenthal worked in the 1980s, he placed a porous membrane between his political views and his writing. It is the sort of partisan, if also intellectual, engagement that makes mainstream journalists, even those of liberal politics, deeply uncomfortable."[11]