Jane Mayer - Career

Career

Mayer began her journalistic career in Vermont, writing for two small weekly papers, The Weathersfield Weekly and The Black River Tribune, then moving on to a daily paper, The Rutland Herald. She was a metropolitan reporter for the now-defunct Washington Star, then joined The Wall Street Journal in 1982, where she worked for 12 years, during which time she was named the newspaper's first female White House correspondent, and subsequently senior writer and front page editor. She also served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the Journal, where she reported on bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the last days of Communism in the former Soviet Union. She was nominated twice by the Journal for the Pulitzer Prize for feature-writing.

Mayer has also contributed to the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the liberal American Prospect and co-authored two books—Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (written with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 (1989) (written with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House. Strange Justice served as the basis for the Showtime television movie of the same name, starring Delroy Lindo, Mandy Patinkin and Regina Taylor.

Of the portrait painted by co-authors Abramson and Mayer of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in Strange Justice, Time said: "Its portrait of Thomas as an id suffering in the role of a Republican superego is more detailed and convincing than anything that has appeared so far." Of Landslide, New York Times Washington correspondent Steven V. Roberts, reviewing the book in The Times, said "this is clearly a reporter's book, full of rich anecdote and telling detail.... I am impressed with the amount of inside information collected here."

Mayer is married to William B. Hamilton, a former editor at The Washington Post and now an editor at the Politico website. Hamilton's father was a foreign correspondent and U.N. bureau chief for The Times and his grandfather was the editor and publisher of The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and a member of the Democratic National Committee. They have one daughter, Kate.