Leonard Downie Headshot
Report a problem with this profile
[email protected]

Leonard Downie  

Journalist and Longtime Washington Post Executive Editor, Author of "The Rules of the Game"

Leonard Downie Jr. is Weil Professor of Journalism at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. He served as executive editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008. During Downie’s seventeen years as executive editor, the news staff won twenty-five Pulitzer Prizes including three Pulitzer gold medals for public service. His books include "Justice Denied," "Mortgage on America," "The New Muckrakers," and "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril with Robert G. Kaiser," which won the Goldsmith Award from the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Downie’s most recent work and his first work of fiction, "The Rules of the Game," is a novel of corruption and cover-ups at the highest levels of Washington politics, as a national newspaper digs up the dark secrets of a powerful lobbying firm thereby exposing a network of wrongdoing by government contractors in Iraq that extends all the way to the White House.

Downie is a seasoned speaker and has spoken at Oxford University, Columbia University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University, Chautauqua, and for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, among others. He speaks on a variety of topics, drawing from his own experiences and incorporating the current headlines, resulting in engaging and timely lectures that give audiences a peek inside the inner workings of Washington.

Speech Topics


Presidential Power and Accountability

Government Secrecy and National Security

News About the News

Reporting Iraq

How Washington Really Works

The Press and Politics

Related Speakers View all


More like Leonard