David Broder was a respected commentator, who covered the White House and the US political scene for four decades. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the Watergate scandal. He covered every presidential convention since 1956 and was regarded as the dean of the Washington political press corps.
Broder was an old-fashioned, shoe-leather-and-notebook reporter from the era before the age of celebrity journalism. His writing could be pedestrian, and as US politics grew more polarised his style of objectivity and impartiality ran out of fashion. He was nevertheless widely regarded as the journalist with the best informed contacts. Senator Richard Lugar once observed that he set the “gold standard” for political journalism.
Broder was born in 1929 in Chicago Heights, Illinois, where his father was a dentist. At 15 he entered the University of Chicago. He received a BA in 1947 and a master’s degree in political science in 1951. After two years in the army he began his newspaper career in Bloomington, Illinois. In 1955 he was hired as a reporter by the Congressional Quarterly in Washington. He later worked for the Washington Star newspaper and in 1965 was hired as a political reporter by The New York Times.
He lasted 18 months there and attributed his brief stay to turf feuds between the Washington bureau and the New York home office. The Editor of The Washington Post Ben Bradlee wrote in his memoir A Good Life that Broder was “the first top rank reporter ever to quit the Times for the Post”.
Broder then began his 33-year career with the Post by designing the paper’s campaign and election coverage for the 1968 presidential election that brought Richard Nixon to office.
Advertisement
At the same time he began almost a second career as a panellist and commentator on TV news programmes. Despite a somewhat unexciting personality, he became known as a sober and reliable commentator on the political scene. He first appeared on the nationwide TV programme Meet the Press in 1964 and made his 400th appearance on the programme in 2008.
Broder reported on a dozen presidential campaigns for The Washington Post including his exclusive story that Senator Edmund Muskie, campaigning for the Democrat nomination, and infuriated by attacks on him and his wife by William Loeb, had wept during an outdoor news conference in a snow storm.
Muskie said later that he had been wiping snow from his face, not crying, but the perception of him being over- emotional damaged his campaign and contributed to his failure to gain the presidential nomination.
In his coverage of US politics Broder was estimated to have travelled 100,000 miles annually. He was the man in the words of a profile in Time magazine “who always got on one more plane, knocked on one more door, made one more phone call. He has earned his reputation not with flamboyance but with meticulousness. Refusing to be confined to Washington he thrives on the gruelling cross-country chicken-and-peas circuit. Day in, day out, he lives with politics.”
As well as setting the standard for political reporting, Broder was also a role model for many colleagues. He was generous to young reporters new to the beat. His colleagues on the Post noted that Broder had the messiest office in the news room, was frequently willing to share a byline with junior colleagues and was slow to adapt to the new communications technology. He found it difficult at first to compose on a computer and on one election tour travelled with both a computer and a portable typewriter as a back-up.
Advertisement
His books included The Party’s Over: The Failure of Politics in America, which argued for reforms of the two-party system to combat “a rising tide of distrust of government and public officials”, The System which examined the failure of President Clinton’s healthcare programme, and The Man Who Would be President about the VicePresident Dan Quayle.
In accepting his Pulitzer prize in 1973, Broder observed that “the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat floored and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours, distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep”.
Broder married his college classmate Ann Collar in 1951. She survives him as do four sons.
David Broder, political commentator, was born on September 11, 1929. He died on March 9, 2011, aged 81