John Harris

Editor-in-Chief
Politico.com

Watch Harris' most recent appearances on Washington Week

John Harris covers national politics for The Washington Post. He started with the paper in 1985 as a summer intern and worked his way up through a succession of local and national beats. For his first four years at the paper, Harris was assigned to roam the newly emerging outer suburbs of Northern Virginia, exploring and explaining to readers a fast-growing and increasingly integral part of the Washington region. Harris's coverage in Loudoun and Prince William counties helped lead to the opening of the Post's first Metro bureaus in those jurisdictions.

In 1990, Harris was moved to the Richmond bureau, where he covered Virginia state government and politics for four years, including the turbulent and historic tenure of Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the first African American elected governor in the United States since Reconstruction.

Harris transferred to Washington and the National staff in 1994, when he began reporting about the Pentagon, including the U.S. military intervention in Haiti. The next year, he was moved over to the White House beat, arriving just as President Clinton was trying to recover from the 1994 mid-term elections. For the next few years, Harris has written about the ups and downs of the Clinton presidency, from the depths of the federal government shutdowns to the triumphant 1996 re-election and everything in between.

Harris also served as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 2003 — focusing on the Clinton presidency and national politics.

A native of Rochester, New York, Harris graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he studied American history. He and his wife life in Alexandria, Virginia with their two children.

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