Peter Baker (author)

Peter Baker is an American political writer and newspaper reporter who is currently White House correspondent for New York Times and a contributing writer for the The New York Times Magazine responsible for covering President Obama and his administration. Prior to joining The Times in 2008, Baker was a reporter for 20 years at The Washington Post, where he also covered the White House during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. During his first tour at the White House, Baker co-authored the original story breaking the Lewinsky scandal and served as the paper’s lead writer during the subsequent impeachment battle. During his next White House assignment, he covered the travails of Bush’s second term, from the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina to Supreme Court nomination fights and the economy.

In between stints at the White House, Baker and his wife, Susan Glasser, spent four years as Moscow Bureau Chiefs, chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin, the rollback of Russian democracy, the Second Chechen War and the terrorist attacks on a theater in Moscow and the Beslan school hostage crisis. Baker also covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was the first American newspaper journalist to report from rebel-held northern Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, and he spent the next eight months covering the overthrow of the Taliban and the emergence of a new government. He later spent six months in the Middle East, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq and around the region before embedding with the U.S. Marines as they drove toward Baghdad.

Baker is author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton (Scribner, 2000) and co-author, with Glasser, of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution (Scribner, 2005), named one of the Best Books of 2005 by The Washington Post Book World. He has written another book on the presidency to be published in October 2013 by Doubleday titled Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House. He won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Coverage of the Presidency for his reporting on Bush and the Aldo Beckman Memorial Award for his coverage of Obama.

Baker is a regular panelist on PBS’s “Washington Week” and a frequent guest on other television and radio programs. A native of the Washington area, Baker attended Oberlin College and worked for The Washington Times for two years before joining The Post in 1988 as a Virginia reporter. He and Glasser live in Washington with their son Theodore.