Who

Old-time liberal Rick Hertzberg is a columnist and editor at the New Yorker.

Backstory

The son of a Columbia professor and a journalist, Hertzberg started out in the mid-1960s reporting from San Francisco for Newsweek, covering the rise of the counterculture. After a stint in the Navy from 1966 to 1969, he was hired by New Yorker editor William Shawn as a reporter for the "Talk of the Town" section. Hertzberg switched sides in the 1970s and worked as a speechwriter for New York governor Hugh Carey and President Jimmy Carter; he stayed with the president until Carter left office in 1981, and then signed on as editor of The New Republic, where he worked on and off throughout the 1980s.

In 1992, Hertzberg was hired by then-editor Tina Brown as The New Yorker's executive editor. He's been there ever since (although these days he bicycles to the Condé Nast building to work under editor-in-chief David Remnick). One of the most influential voices in liberal political circles, Hertzberg is best known for expounding the magazine's political positions and, in recent years, for penning stinging rebukes of President Bush and the Republican administration. A collection of Hertzberg's writings for the New Yorker, Observations and Arguments, 1966-2004, was published by Penguin in 2004.

Personal

Hertzberg is married to fellow New Yorker editor Virginia Cannon. They have a son named Wolf. The family lives on West 106th Street and spends weekends in South Nyack, NY. At his country house, Hertzberg has a framed collection of political campaign buttons going back to Grover Cleveland. His office displays a letter from President Carter admonishing him for his poor grammar.

True story

Hertzberg took part in his first presidential campaign when he was nine: He handed out leaflets and buttons for Adlai Stevenson.