George Will

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George Will bigraphy, stories - American writer

George Will : biography

May 4, 1941 –

George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics. In 1986, the Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America", in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).quoted in Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (1999) p. 87–88.

Personal

Family

Will has three children—Victoria, Geoffrey, and Jonathan—with his first wife, Madeleine;Think College, executive committee: (Access date October 30, 2011) Jon was born in 1972 with Down syndrome, which Will has written about in his column on occasion. In 1989 he and Madeleine divorced after 22 years of marriage.Jack Friedman, "Turning from Politics, George Will Writes a Love Story About Men and Baseball," People Magazine, Vol. 34 No. 1, July 09, 1990

In 1991 Will married Mari Maseng. They have one child, a son named David, born in 1992, and live in the Washington, D.C. area. Maseng is a political consultant and speechwriter who was in charge of communications for the Rick Perry 2012 presidential campaign. She earlier worked on Michele Bachmann’s 2012 presidential campaign, and offered her services to the Mitt Romney 2012 campaign., Ben Smith, Politico, November 12, 2011, George Will, This Week (ABC TV series), November 13, 2011 She previously worked for Reagan as a presidential speechwriter, deputy director of transportation, and Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. She also was a former communications director for Robert Dole.

Interests

Will is a fan of baseball, and has written extensively on the game, including his best-selling book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. He was one of many interview subjects for Baseball, Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series. He is a Chicago Cubs fan.

Will revealed in a Colbert Report interview that he is an agnostic.http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/171135/june-03-2008/george-will

Awards

In addition to more than 16 honorary degrees:

  • 1977 – Pulitzer Prize for Commentary
  • 1978 – Headliner Award for consistently outstanding feature columns
  • 1979 – Finalist for National Magazine Award in essays and criticism
  • 1980 – Silurian Award for editorial writing
  • 1991 – Silurian Award for editorial writing
  • 1991 – First Place in Interpretive Columns: Clarion Awards from Women in Communications
  • 1991 – Cronkite Award, Arizona State University
  • 1992 – Madison Medal Award, Princeton University
  • 1993 – William Allen White Award, William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas
  • 2003 – Walter B. Wriston Lecture Award, The Manhattan Institute
  • 2005 – Bradley Prize, The Bradley Foundation (http://www.bradleyfdn.org/cm-prizes.asp?ID=2005BradleyPrizeWinners)
  • 2006 – Champion of Liberty Award, Goldwater Institute (http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_can_we_make_iraq.html)

Criticism of Republican politicians

Despite his identification with conservative politics, Will has criticized fellow Republicans.

Will was among the first to oppose President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court.

Even though Will had been hawkish in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he eventually expressed reservations about Bush administration Iraq policies, eventually openly criticizing what he perceived to be an unrealistically optimistic set of political scenarios. In March 2006, in a column written in the aftermath of the apparently sectarian bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, Baghdad, Will challenged the Bush administration—and U.S. government representatives in Iraq—to be more honest about the difficulties the United States faced in rebuilding and maintaining order within Iraq, comparing the White House’s rhetoric unfavorably to that of Winston Churchill during the early years of World War II. Will described the optimistic assessments delivered from the Bush administration as the "rhetoric of unreality". He criticized the Bush Iraq policy, and broader White House and congressional foreign and domestic policy making, in his keynote address for the Cato Institute’s 2006 Milton Friedman Prize dinner.