David E. Sanger

Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Experience

David E. Sanger is a senior fellow and adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and is one of the newspaper's senior writers. In a 28-year career at the paper, he has reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, specializing in foreign policy, national security and the politics of globalization. He is also the author of the New York Times best-seller "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power,'' (2009) based on his seven years as the Times' White House correspondent, covering two wars, the confrontations with Iran, North Korea and other rogue states, and America's efforts to deal with the rise of China. Twice he has been a member of Times reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize.

Soon after joining the Times in 1982, Mr. Sanger began specializing in the confluence of economic and foreign policy. Throughout the '80's and '90's, he wrote extensively about how issues of national wealth and competitiveness came to redefine the relationships between the United States and its major allies. He was correspondent and then bureau chief in Tokyo for six years, travelling widely in Asia. He wrote some of the first pieces describing North Korea's nuclear weapons program, the rise and fall of Japan as one of the world's economic powerhouses, and China's emerging role.

Returning to Washington in 1994, he took up the position of chief Washington economic correspondent, and covered a series of global economic upheavals, from Mexico to the Asian economic crisis. He was named a senior writer in March 1999, and White House correspondent later that year. He was named chief Washington correspondent in October 2006.           

In 1986 Mr. Sanger played a major role in the team that investigated the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The team revealed the design flaws and bureaucratic troubles that contributed to the disaster, and won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. A decade later he was a member of another Pulitzer-winning team that wrote about the Clinton administration's struggles to control exports to China.

Mr. Sanger was also awarded, in 2004, the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting for his coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises. He also won the Aldo Beckman prize for coverage of the presidency. In both 2003 and 2007 he was awarded the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for coverage of national security strategy. He also shared the American Society of Newspaper Editor's top award for deadline writing in 2004, for team coverage of the Columbia disaster.

In 2007, The New York Times received the DuPont Award from the Columbia Journalism School for Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?, a documentary featuring Mr. Sanger and his colleague William J. Broad, and their investigation into the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. Their revelations in the Times about the network became a finalist for the Pultizer Prize.

Mr. Sanger appears regularly on public affairs and news shows, including "Washington Week'' on PBS, and the three main Sunday news shows, "Face the Nation,'' "Meet the Press'' and "This Week.'' He also delivers the weekly "Washington Report on WQXR,  part of New York Public Radio. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.

Born on July 5, 1960 in White Plains, NY, Mr. Sanger was educated in the public school system and graduated magna cum laude in government from Harvard College in 1982.