Open VISIONS :: Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek. He arrived at the magazine as a writer in January 1995, became national affairs editor in June of that year, and was named managing editor in November 1998. He supervises the magazine's coverage of politics, international affairs, and breaking news, and has written cover stories on politics, religion, race, guns in America, and the death of Ronald Reagan. In 2001, Newsweek won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence - the industry's highest honor - for its coverage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In 2003, the magazine won the award again for its coverage of President Bush and the Iraq War.

Meacham's book Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, was published by Random House on October 21, 2003, and was a New York Times bestseller. The New York Times said the book was "written with grace and conviction"; it was also named a book of the year by The Los Angeles Times and won The Churchill Centre's 2005 Emery Reves Award for the best book of the year on Winston Churchill (previous winners include Roy Jenkins and William Manchester) and the William H. Colby Military Writers' Symposium's Book of the Year Award. The paperback edition of Franklin and Winston was also a New York Times bestseller.

He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book World. In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Random House), a collection of distinguished nonfiction about the midcentury struggle against Jim Crow.

A contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, Meacham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a communicant of St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, where he serves on the Vestry of the 180 year-old Episcopal parish. He is also a member of the Board of Regents of The University of the South, the Vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street, the Leadership Council of the Harvard Divinity School, and the National Advisory Group of Washington National Cathedral. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 2005.

Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham graduated from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree summa cum laude in English Literature; he was salutatorian and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He began his career at The Chattanooga Times.

Meacham's newest book, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, was published by Random House on April 11, 2006 and became a New York Times bestseller. He is also at work on a biography of Andrew Jackson and his White House circle. He and his wife, Keith, the director of development at the Harlem Day Charter School, live in New York City with their two children.