Joe Conason
Visiting Fellow
Joe Conason is a Visiting Fellow at American Progress and a reporter, author, and editor. He also co-directs the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, which encourages investigative reporting in the independent media, in addition to writing weekly columns for Salon.com and the New York Observer.
Prior to joining the Observer, Conason spent two years as editor-at-large for Conde Nast’s Details magazine. From 1978 to 1990 he worked for The Village Voice as a columnist, staff writer, and national correspondent. In 1985 he co-authored the Village Voice’s worldwide scoop exposing Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s hidden Manhattan real estate holdings. In 1989 he arrived in Beijing, China, on the night after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reported on the tragic aftermath of the confrontation between demonstrators and the Chinese government.
During the Clinton administration Conason’s investigative reporting on Whitewater and the presidency brought him national media attention. He revealed the existence of the “Arkansas Project,” a secret, multimillion-dollar plan funded by a conservative Pittsburgh billionaire to find or invent negative material about the Clintons. Four years ago, he was the first journalist to delve into the background and finances of the so-called “Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth” and its campaign against John Kerry.
Conason is the author of several books, including Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), which was a New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller. With Gene Lyons he co-authored The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), which appeared on both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. In 2004 Conason co-produced "The Hunting of the President," a documentary film based on the book.
His most recent book is It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (St. Martins Press, 2007), which the New York Review of Books praised for “pithy insights” and “a well-written account of an administration bent on establishing authoritarian executive power.”
His articles and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian (London), and The New Yorker, among many other periodicals in the United States and abroad. He also appears frequently as a commentator on television and radio, is the winner of the New York Press Club’s Byline Award, and has covered every American presidential election since 1980.
He is currently reporting and writing a new book on President Bill Clinton’s life and work since leaving the White House in 2001, titled The Further Adventures of William Jefferson Clinton, for Simon and Schuster.
He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 with honors in history. He was born in New York City, where he resides today with his wife, Elizabeth Wagley, and their two children.
