E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Bethesda, MD

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a senior fellow and the W. Averell Harriman Chair in American Governance in the Governance Studies program at Brookings. Dionne is a contributing columnist for the New York Times a professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University. A nationally known and respected commentator on politics, Dionne appears weekly on National Public Radio and regularly on MSNBC. He has also appeared on News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other PBS programs. Dionne began his career with New York Times, where he spent 14 years reporting on state and local government, national politics, and from around the world, including stints in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. The Los Angeles Times praised his coverage of the Vatican as the best in two decades. In 1990, Dionne joined the Washington Post as a reporter covering national politics, and he began writing his column in 1993.

Dionne has been named among the 25 most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal and among the capital city’s top 50 journalists by the Washingtonian magazine. He was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002, he received the Empathy Award from the Volunteers of America, and in 2004 he won the National Human Services Assembly’s Award for Excellence by a Member of the Media. In 2006, he gave the Theodore H. White Lecture at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. The Sidney Hillman Foundation presented him with the Hillman Award for Career Achievement in 2011. Dionne grew up in Fall River, Mass. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Harvard University in 1973 and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.