Eleanor Clift


Eleanor Clift is an American political reporter, television pundit, and author. She is a contributor to MSNBC and blogger for The Daily Beast. She is a regular panelist on the nationally syndicated show The McLaughlin Group, which she has compared to "a televised food fight". Clift is a board member at the IWMF.

Early years

Clift was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of German immigrants from the island of Föhr in the North Sea. She grew up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, where her parents ran a deli in Sunnyside. Clift was raised a Lutheran and attended Hofstra University and Hunter College. She began her career in 1963 as a secretary at Newsweek, and is 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. 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.

Career

She has appeared in four movies. She played a talk show panel member in Rising Sun, and appeared as herself in Dave, Independence Day and Getting Away with Murder. 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 wrote in the book, "Religion and politics are supposed to be separate."
She was a keynote speaker at the 2012 Washington & Jefferson College Energy Summit, where the Washington & Jefferson College Energy Index was unveiled.
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story, Clift addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative and focused on America as a social movement, writing, "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."

Honors

Clift's first marriage was to William Brooks Clift, Jr., 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, a Washington columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. They remained together until his death of kidney cancer on 30 March 2005.