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Robert Scheer

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Robert Scheer, (b. 1936) is an American liberal writer and author, a University of Southern California professor, and a Los Angeles Times columnist.

Scheer was born in 1936 to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

After spending time in San Francisco working at City Lights Books, and co-authoring an academic book on Cuba, he moved into journalism. Between 1964 and 1969, he was, variously, the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts Magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, Fidel Castro personally gave Scheer the diaries of Che Guevara for publication in Ramparts.

In July of 1970, Scheer was part of a Black Panther Party-led delegation to North Korea, according to a Black Panther newspaper.[1] Right-wing pundit David Horowitz -- who says he earlier orchestrated Scheer's firing from Ramparts when Horowitz himself was on the far left -- claims that sometime after his visit to Pyongyang, Scheer joined the Red Sun Rising commune in Berkeley, which was devoted to "armed struggle" and the teachings of Kim Il-Sung. Scheer has denied Horowitz's claim that he was ever in Red Sun Rising or was a follower of Kim Il-Sung. [2].

After nearly a decade as a freelancer for magazines including the New Times and Playboy, from 1976 to 1993 he joined the Los Angeles Times with the help of his wife, Narda Zacchino, a chief editor at the paper. He wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections.

Currently, his op-ed column runs every Tuesday in the Times and then is syndicated nationally. He is also a contributing editor for The Nation magazine, and can be heard on the nationally syndicated political radio program "Left, Right and Center" produced at KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica.

Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon on through Bill Clinton. He conducted the famous 1976 Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, in which the then-presidential candidate admitted to have lusted in his heart. In an interview with George Bush, the future president and then presidential candidate revealed that he believed nuclear war was "winnable." Scheer has profiled politicians from Jerry Brown to Willie Brown, from Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski as well as entertainment figures such as Tom Cruise.

Scheer has written six books including a collection entitled Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War; and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals. His most recent book was published in 2004 and made it to the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List. The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq was co-authored by his oldest son Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at Alternet.

Scheer was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos award recipient. He won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his writing in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation about the case of Wen Ho Lee. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, UC San Diego and Yale University.

Scheer was a creative script consultant on the Oliver Stone film, Nixon which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He appears in small speaking roles as a journalist in several feature films, including The Siege and Bulworth. In 2005, a documentary on the activist and philanthropist Stanley Sheinbaum that Scheer co-produced premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

He has also taught courses at Antioch College in San Francisco, New York City College, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley. He is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where he teaches two courses each semester on media and society.

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