Carl P. Leubsdorf was Washington Bureau Chief of The Dallas Morning News from 1981 through 2008 and continues to write a weekly column for the paper and its web site, www.dallasnews.com. The column has appeared every Thursday since March 1981 and and is distributed nationally by the McClatchy Tribune (MCT) News Service.
Carl Leubsdorf
A native of New York City (3/17/38), he received his B.A. with honors in government in 1959 from Cornell University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was also associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. In 1960, he received a M.S. with honors in journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 1999, he received the school’s Alumni Award.
From 1960 to 1975, he worked for the Associated Press in New Orleans, New York, and Washington. He came to Washington in 1963, covered Congress from 1966 through 1975 and, from 1973 through 1975, was chief of the AP’s Senate staff and chief political writer.
From 1976 to 1981, Mr. Leubsdorf was a correspondent in the Washington Bureau of The Baltimore Sun, covering the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns and serving as White House correspondent from 1977 to mid-1979.
With The News, he primarily wrote about the White House and national politics, while directing the paper’s political and Washington coverage. In 2001, Washingtonian Magazine named him one of Washington’s top 50 journalists.
Mr. Leubsdorf has been to 23 national conventions and covered every presidential election since 1960. He has written about 10 presidents – John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – and 10 vice presidents – Hubert Humphrey, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, George Bush, Dan Quayle, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden.
In addition, he has been a visiting fellow at Yale University; written for the Columbia and Washington Journalism Reviews, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science. He has appeared on many television shows, including CBS’s “Face the Nation”, NBC’s “Meet the Press”, PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and “Lehrer News Hour”, CNN’s “Inside Politics” and “Reliable Sources”, “The McLaughlin Group” and C-SPAN Journalist Roundtables — more than any other journalist in its first 25 years.
For four years, he was co-host of a weekly public affairs television program, “Capital Conversation,” which combined the resources of The Dallas Morning News and the broadcast bureau of its parent corporation, Belo Corp. The program, which was seen in Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio on Belo stations, won the Dallas Press Club’s 1998 Katie Award for best television public affairs program.
He was president in 1996 of the White House Correspondents’ Association and in 2008 of the Gridiron Club, Washington’s oldest journalistic organization. He is currently the organization’s secretary.