Peter Baker (author)

Peter Baker (born 1967) is an American political writer and newspaper reporter who is the White House correspondent for The New York Times and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He was responsible for covering President Barack Obama and the Obama administration. After being assigned as Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times he was, in December 2016, reassigned to the White House beat for the incoming Trump Administration.

Baker was born in 1967, the son of Linda Henderson Gross (later Sinrod) and E. P. Baker. His father was a lawyer and his mother a computer programmer. He is a 1988 graduate of Oberlin College.

Prior to joining The New York 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 paper's first story about 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.

Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution was named one of the Best Books of 2005 by The Washington Post Book World. 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, D.C. area, Baker attended Oberlin College, where he worked as a reporter for the student newspaper, The Oberlin Review. After graduating, he worked for The Washington Times for two years before joining the Post in 1988 as a reporter covering Virginia news.

In October 2013, Baker published Days Of Fire, which was listed as one of the top ten books of 2013 by The New York Times.

In 2000, he married Susan Glasser in a civil ceremony. His wife is editor of Politico. The couple lives in Washington with their son Theodore.