George Will
George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American libertarian-conservative political commentator and author. He writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America", in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977.
Will was born on May 4, 1941, in Champaign, Illinois, to Louise (née Hendrickson) and Frederick L. Will His father was a professor of philosophy, specializing in epistemology, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Will attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois where he graduated in 1959.
After high school, Will went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, graduating in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion. He then went to England and attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied in Oxford's philosophy, politics and economics program and received a bachelor's degree (promoted to a master's per tradition). Will then did doctoral study in political science at Princeton University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation entitled "Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society", alluding to a famous phrase from Justice Robert H. Jackson’s majority opinion in the landmark 1943 Supreme Court case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.
From 1970 to 1972, he served on the staff of Republican Senator Gordon Allott of Colorado. Will then taught political philosophy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998.
Will has three children—Victoria, Geoffrey, and Jonathan—with his first wife, Madeleine; their eldest child,[60] Jonathan, was born in 1972 with Down syndrome, which Will has written about in his column on occasion. In 1989, he and Madeleine divorced after 22 years of marriage.
In 1991, Will married Mari Maseng. They have one child, a son named David, born in 1992, and live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C.[65] Maseng is a political consultant and speechwriter who was in charge of communications for the Rick Perry 2012 presidential campaign, and most recently worked on Scott Walker's 2016 presidential campaign. She earlier worked on Michele Bachmann's 2012 presidential campaign, and offered her services to the Mitt Romney 2012 campaign.[66][67] She previously worked for Ronald Reagan as a presidential speechwriter, deputy director of transportation, and Assistant to the President for Public Liaison. She also was a former communications director for Senator Bob Dole.
Will was occasionally lampooned in the comic Doonesbury, particularly in a December 1980 sequence of strips in which several characters attend a party hosted by Will for the Reagans.
Will was lampooned in a skit on an April 1990 episode of the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. Dana Carvey played Will as the host of the fictional baseball trivia game show George F. Will's Sports Machine, in which the answers are all highflown literary metaphors that leave the contestants befuddled; the exasperated contestants finally get Will to try to throw a baseball, which he is unable to do.
In the Seinfeld season 6 episode "The Jimmy", Kramer mentions that he finds George Will attractive.
courtesy-wikipedia
- George Will