Jon Meacham

Managing editor, Newsweek

Jon Meacham’s book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, has become a bestseller since its publication in early 2006.

Newsweek’s managing editor since 1998, Meacham was named editor of the weekly newsmagazine in October 2006. In this position, he oversees all day-to-day editorial operations of Newsweek and Newsweek.com.

Meacham began his journalism career as a reporter with The Chattanooga Times from 1991-1992. He was an editor for two years at The Washington Monthly. After arriving at Newsweek in January 1995, he became National Affairs editor in June of that year, supervising coverage of politics and breaking news. In 1998, he edited Newsweek’s coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. That coverage was honored with a 1999 National Magazine Award for Reporting.

Meacham also has written cover stories on politics, religion, guns in America, race, and President Ronald Reagan’s death. He played a key role in editing coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks, for which Newsweek received a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. The magazine won the same award again in 2003 for coverage of President Bush and the war in Iraq.

His books also include Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, published in 2003, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill. In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement, a literary anthology of the most important non-fiction accounts of the 20th century battle against Jim Crow. He is working on a biography of Andrew Jackson and his White House circle.

Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham is a graduate of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. He is a communicant of St. Thomas Episcopal Church Fifth Avenue and serves on the Vestry of the 180-year-old parish. He also is a member of the Vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street and, in 2005, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Yale University’s Berkeley Divinity School. Meacham lives in New York City with his wife, Keith, director of development at Harlem Day Charter School, and their two children.