Elizabeth Drew

Biography

Elizabeth Brenner was born on November 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the daughter of William J. Brenner, a furniture manufacturer and Estelle Jacobs. Drew was married to J. Patterson Drew from 1964 until his death in 1970 and was married to David Webster from 1981 until his death in 2003. She currently resides in Washington D.C.

Drew attended Wellesley College, where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1957 with a BA in Political Science. Her first journalism job was with Congressional Quarterly beginning in 1959. She was Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly (1967–1973) and The New Yorker (1973–1992). She made regular appearances on "Agronsky and Company" and hosted her own interview program for PBS between 1971 and 1973. Drew was a panelist for Meet the Press for many years and made frequent appearances on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and still occasionally appears on The NewsHour and other radio and television programs.

Drew was a panelist for the first debate in the 1976 U.S. Presidential election, and moderated the debate between the Democratic candidates for the nomination in the 1984 race.

Drew has published 14 books, including Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-74 (1975), an account of the Watergate scandal; Portrait of an Election: The 1980 Presidential Campaign (1981); On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (1994); Citizen McCain (2002); and George W. Bush's Washington (2004). Her most recent book is Richard M. Nixon (2007). Washington Journal was re-issued in 2014, with a new afterword.

In Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden wrote of "Elizabeth Drew's On the Edge, an account of Clinton's first years in the White House. Drew's is the best account I've read of the Somalia episode from the White House's perspective."

She was chosen to give the Knight Lecture at Stanford University in 1997.

She is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, as well as to its website. She has also written for Rolling Stone.

Drew is a former director of the Council on Foreign Relations (1972–1977).

Criticism

In 1986, the editors of Snooze: The Best of Our Magazine parodied her as "Elizabeth Drone," author of a "Giant Postcard From Washington."

In 1989, Spy magazine labeled her as the "author of too-frequent Washington columns."

In 2014, President Richard Nixon's former aide Frank Gannon disputed Drew’s “blithe assertions that Nixon was a Dilantin-addicted alcoholic,” arguing that they were “as untrue as they are ugly.”