Eleanor Clift
Eleanor Clift (née Roeloffs, born July 7, 1940) is an American political reporter, television pundit, and author. She is a contributor to MSNBC and blogger for The Daily Beast.[1] She is best known as regular panelist on the The McLaughlin Group.[2] Clift is a board member at the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation).[3]
Eleanor Clift | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Eleanor Roeloffs July 7, 1940 |
| Education | Hofstra University Hunter College |
| Occupation | Journalist |
Notable credit(s) | The Daily Beast MSNBC |
| Spouse(s) | William Brooks Clift, Jr. Tom Brazaitis (1989-2005†) |
| Children | Edward Montgomery Clift Woodbury Blair Clift Robert Anderson Clift |
| Relatives | Montgomery Clift (brother-in-law) |
| Website | eleanorclift.com |
Early years
Eleanor Roeloffs was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of German immigrants from the island of Föhr in the North Sea.[4] She grew up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, where her parents ran a deli in Sunnyside.[5] Clift was raised a Lutheran[6] and attended Hofstra University and Hunter College. She began her career in 1963 as a secretary at Newsweek, and was one of the first female reporters to earn an internship from the secretary pool. Clift later became White House correspondent for Newsweek and has covered every presidential campaign for the magazine since 1976.
Broadcasting career
She began a broadcast career on The Diane Rehm Show on WAMU-FM, Washington, D.C., as a Friday week-in-review panelist. She became known to listeners for her good-natured acceptance of ribbing from other panelists and callers to the program.
She became a regular panelist on the nationally syndicated show The McLaughlin Group, which she has compared to "a televised food fight".[2]
Her role as a talk show panelist has lead to appearences in movies. Clift played a panelist in Rising Sun (1993) and appeared as herself in Dave (1993), Independence Day (1996) and Getting Away with Murder (1996). She was portrayed by Jan Hooks on Saturday Night Live. She was also portrayed by actress Mary Ann Burger in the 2009 film Watchmen.
In 2008, she wrote Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics, which intertwines the events of her own life and those of the nation concerning the Terri Schiavo case during a two-week period in March 2005. In it she examines the way people in the United States deal with death, publicity and personality.
She was a keynote speaker at the 2012 Washington & Jefferson College Energy Summit, where the Washington & Jefferson College Energy Index was unveiled.[7]
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Clift addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative and focused on America as a social movement, writing, "[S]ocial movements are America's story, and they're my story as a woman born in the middle of the last century whose life was made measurably better amid these broad strokes of history."[8]
Honors
- Hoover Institution William and Barbara Edwards Media Fellow September 16–22, 2002[9]
Personal life
Clift's first marriage was to William Brooks Clift, Jr. (1919–1986), the older brother of actor Montgomery Clift. They had three sons: Edward Montgomery, Woodbury Blair, and Robert Anderson. In September 1989, she married Tom Brazaitis,[10] a Washington columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. They remained together until his death of kidney cancer on 30 March 2005.[11][12]
Bibliography
- Clift, Eleanor (1996). War Without Bloodshed: The Art of Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80084-5.
- Clift, Eleanor (2000). Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0-684-85619-0.
- Clift, Eleanor (2003). Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-42612-1.
- Clift, Eleanor (2004). Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-58648-293-9.
- Clift, Eleanor (2008). Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00251-X.
- Eleanor Clift and Matthew Spieler (2012). Selecting a President. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 978-1-250-00449-9
References
- Eleanor Clift's blogger's page on The Daily Beast
- Press Forum
- IWMF website "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-08-04. Retrieved 2016-01-30.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
- Clift, Eleanor (2009). Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics. PublicAffairs. p. 39. ISBN 0-465-01280-9.
- Solomon, Deborah. "Questions for Eleanor Clift: Grande Dame", The New York Times, March 2, 2008. Accessed May 28, 2009. "Where are you from? I grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and my father had a deli, Roeloffs Deli, in Sunnyside."
- Norman, Michael (2008-04-02). "Eleanor Clift explores the personal and public sides of death in new memoir". The Plain Dealer. Retrieved 2010-03-09.
- "Eisenhower and Clift Headline first W&J Energy Summit" (PDF). W&J Magazine. Washington & Jefferson College. Summer 2012. p. 11. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
- Claybourn, Joshua, ed. (2019). Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books. pp. 160–167. ISBN 1640121706.
- "William and Barbara Edwards Media Fellows by year". Hoover Institution. Archived from the original on 2011-11-01. Retrieved 2011-10-27.
- Eleanor Clift (1 April 2005). "Eleanor Clift: Facing Death With Courage". Newsweek. Archived from the original on 2005-04-06. Retrieved 2008-10-11.
- mediabistro.com: FishbowlDC Archived 2006-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
Further reading
- Clift, Eleanor, "The Magazine That Was: Eleanor Clift on Her 50 Years at Newsweek", Newsweek, September 27, 2013
- Clift, Eleanor, "The White House", newsweekmemories.org website
