Peter Baker (journalist)
Peter Eleftherios Baker (born July 2, 1967) is an American journalist and author. He is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC, and was previously a reporter for The Washington Post for 20 years. Baker has covered five presidencies, from Bill Clinton through Joe Biden. Early life and education Baker was born in 1967, the son of Linda Gross (later Sinrod) and E. P. Baker. His mother was a computer programmer and his father was an attorney. Baker attended Oberlin College from 1984 to 1986, where he worked as a reporter and editor for the student newspaper, The Oberlin Review. Baker left Oberlin at the school's insistence because, according to him, he "was not a good student." Baker never completed the coursework for an earned degree, although he was granted an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts by the university in 2021. Career After attending college, Baker worked for The Washington Times for two years. He then joined The Washington Post in 1988 as a reporter covering Virginia news. He spent 20 years there, covering 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 paper's first story about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and served as the paper's lead writer during the subsequent impeachment battle. He subsequently published his first book, The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton through Scribner, a New York Times bestseller based on his coverage of the impeachment proceedings in Congress. 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, the terrorist attack 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 September 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. In May 2005, Baker published his second book, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution through Scribner, with Susan Glasser, a detailed accounting of Vladimir Putin's consolidation of power during his first term as President of Russia. It was later named one of the Best Books of 2005 by The Washington Post Book World. While serving as White House correspondent for The Washington Post, he won the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency in 2007 for his "exceptionally