Elisabeth Bumiller Biography

A Washington reporter for The New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller writes about politics and policy in the nation’s capital, and has been covering Senator John McCain in this year’s presidential campaign. She also recently authored a biography of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

From 2001 to 2006, Bumiller was a Times White House correspondent who also wrote a weekly column, White House Letter, about the people and behind-the-scenes events of the presidency. She was the Times City Hall Bureau chief from 1999 to 2001, during which she covered Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Prior to that, Bumiller worked on the Times’s Metropolitan staff in New York as a general assignment reporter and as one of the writers of the Public Lives column. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine and the newspaper’s culture and travel pages.

From 1979 to 1985, Bumiller worked for The Washington Post in Washington, New Delhi, Tokyo, and New York. Her first job in journalism was in the Naples bureau of The Miami Herald.

Her work Condoleezza Rice: An American Life is based on extensive interviews with the Secretary of State, along with 150 others, and was published in December 2007 by Random House. Bumiller’s previous books include May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India and The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family.

In 2006 and 2007, Bumiller was a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

In 2008, Bumiller covered the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain for the Times. During the campaign, McCain at times clashed with Bumiller and other Times writers. From 2008 to early 2013, Bumiller served as Pentagon correspondent; in this role, she traveled with the Secretary of Defense and was embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In May 2009, the Times published a controversial front-page article by Bumiller citing an unreleased Pentagon report for the proposition that one in seven detainees released from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp "returned to terrorism or militant activity"; this figure was criticized as inflated in a Times op-ed by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, and Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that editors should have taken a more skeptical approach.

Subsequently, Bumiller was named Washington editor. In September 2015, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet announced that Bumiller would replace Carolyn Ryan as the Washington bureau chief.

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