Хендрик Герцберг: Американский журналист и автор речей

American journalist (born 1943)

Hendrik Hertzberg (born July 23, 1943) is an American journalist, best known as the principal political commentator for The New Yorker magazine. He has also been a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and editor of The New Republic, and is the author of ¡Obámanos! The Rise of a New Political Era and Politics: Observations & Arguments. In 2009, Forbes named Hertzberg one of the "25 Most Influential Liberals in the U. S. Media," placing him at number seventeen.

Hertzberg was born in Manhattan, New York City, the son of Hazel Manross Whitman, a professor of history and education at Columbia University, and Sidney Hertzberg, a journalist and political activist. His father was Jewish (and had become an atheist); his mother was a Quaker with a Congregationalist background and of English descent, also a great grandniece of Walt Whitman.

Hertzberg graduated from Suffern High School in Suffern, New York, after a semester as an exchange student in Toulouse, France. He began his writing career at The Harvard Crimson and eventually served as managing editor including writing on local and national politics. In addition, he was president of the Liberal Union, had a jazz program on WHRB, and belonged to the Signet Society. Consumed by his Crimson duties, Hertzberg landed on academic probation for a semester, which required him to withdraw from all extracurricular activities. He managed to continue to write Crimson pieces anyway, under the pseudonym Sidney Hart. Hertzberg declined the invitation and after graduating from Harvard in 1965 he took a draft deferred position as editorial director for the U. S. National Student Association. The following year he joined the San Francisco bureau of Newsweek as a reporter. Hertzberg covered the rise of the hippies, the emergence of rock groups such as the Grateful Dead, Ronald Reagan's successful campaign for governor of California, and The Beatles' last concert. Spy magazine characterized him during this period of his career as a "lothario."

During the 1976 election, Hertzberg wrote speeches for Governor Hugh Carey of New York. After the election, he was recruited to join Carter's speech writing team by James Fallows. After Fallows departed in 1979, Hertzberg became Carter's chief speechwriter. Hertzberg was an author of President Jimmy Carter's July 15, 1979, speech on energy conservation, widely known as the "Malaise Speech" and critiqued as one of the most ineffective pieces of political rhetoric in American history. The reaction by some Americans, who were suffering from high unemployment and an American industrial economy in severe recession, was that President Carter blamed them for the economic problems they were facing when they believed that Carter himself was ineffective in alleviating the recession. Others, however, point out that calls and letters to the White House were overwhelmingly positive, and that Carter's approval rating in polls climbed 11 points. Hertzberg's personal favorite speech is Carter's farewell address of January 14, 1981. It opens with Carter declaring that he leaves the White House "to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of President, the title of citizen." As a liberal author, he also expostulates on the necessity of humanism and secularism in democratic societies and critiques the Conservative Revolution. Hertzberg believes that America’s system of winner take all elections, federalism, and separation of powers is out of date and damaging to political responsibility and democratic accountability. Hertzberg is a frequent guest on television programs, such as Democracy Now!. In 2004, Hertzberg contributed $2,000 to John Kerry.

Hertzberg was twice editor of The New Republic, from 1981 to 1985 and then from 1989 to 1992, alternating in that job with Michael Kinsley. In between his stints as editor he wrote for that and other magazines and was a fellow at two institutes at Harvard Kennedy School, the Institute of Politics and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. In 1992, when Tina Brown became editor of The New Yorker, she recruited Hertzberg as her executive editor, and he helped her redesign and revitalize the magazine. Under Brown's successor, David Remnick, Hertzberg was a senior editor and staff writer and was a main contributor to "Comment," the weekly essay on politics and society in "The Talk of the Town" and continued until early 2014. In 2006, his articles won The New Yorker a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and in five other years (2003, 4, 8, 9 and 11) earned the magazine a Finalist ranking in the awards. From 1995 to 2018, Hertzberg was a board member of FairVote, an electoral reform organization, and continues on its advisory committee.

Hertzberg is married to Virginia Cannon, a former Vanity Fair editor and a current New Yorker editor. They have a son, Wolf.