Author: Hedrick Smith

The Moscow bureau of the New York Times, 1971 to 1974, produced the reporting that won Hedrick Smith the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and then became The Russians (1975), a close look at ordinary Soviet life. He had already shared the 1972 public service Pulitzer for the paper's Pentagon Papers series. Born in Kilmacolm, Scotland, in 1933, he read American history and literature at Williams College, went to Balliol College, Oxford on a Fulbright, and joined the Times in 1962, covering the civil rights South, Saigon, Cairo and Washington, where he was bureau chief from 1976 and chief Washington correspondent until 1988. Television followed: more than fifty hours of PBS documentaries, two of them, The Wall Street Fix and Can You Afford to Retire?, taking Emmy awards. Who Stole the American Dream? (2012) is the book those films were heading toward, tracing how tax policy, the retreat from pensions, flat wages and corporate lobbying since the 1970s pulled the country apart.