Can Obama Avoid the Dark Side? Learning from how the War on Terror Turned into the War on American Ideals

Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in March, 1995. Based in Washington, D.C., she writes about politics for the magazine, and has been covering the war on terror. Recent subjects include Alberto Mora and the Pentagon's secret torture policy, how the United States outsources torture (rendition), the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the legality of C.I.A. interrogations. She has also written about George W. Bush, the bin Laden family, Sarah Palin, and the television show "24."

Before joining the New Yorker, Mayer was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal for twelve years. At the Journal she was a White House correspondent as well as a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent. Among other stories, she covered the bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the final days of Communism in the Soviet Union. Mayer was the 2008 winner of the John Chancellor Award for Journalistic Excellence, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 2008, and winner in 2009 of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard, the Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University, and the Ridenhour Prize. She was also a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

She has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine award, and was nominated twice by the Journal for a Pulitzer Prize in the feature-writing category. Mayer is the author of the best-selling 2008 book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War in Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. She was also the co-author of two additional best-selling books, Strange Justice, written with Jill Abramson. Her first book, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, co-authored by Doyle McManus, was an acclaimed account of the Reagan White House's involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. Mayer graduated with honors from Yale in 1977 and continued her studies in history at Oxford.