As a White House correspondent for the Washington Post, JOHN F. HARRIS is used to puffery and evasion. Which explains why he finds former Clinton aide Harold Ickes, '64, such a welcome, if jarring, departure. "If he's not going to answer a question, he'll tell you so directly," says Harris, 36. "Harold also is fun to talk to because his career intersects with so much history the civil rights and anti-war movements that I was too young to witness." Harris, who won the 1999 White House Correspondents' Association award for outstanding coverage, has been with the Post since 1985. He lives in Alexandria, Va., with his wife, Ann O'Hanlon (a fellow Post reporter), and their young daughter, Liza.
He fell in love with Stanford as an undergrad, but STEVE TOLLEFSON, '71, went across the Bay for his PhD in English. Two decades later he's still at Cal, teaching freshmen to write and faculty to teach (his award-winning pedagogical skills earned him the role of faculty development coordinator). From his home in Berkeley, Tollefson also has written a string of books ranging from grammar guides to "a weird novel." But he's a Farm boy at heart, as he confesses in his essay. "My boss doesn't know about the article yet, but she will be amused," he predicts. "No one will be deeply offended, although they will pretend to be."
Don't tell illustrator PETER HOEY that he wasted his youth watching TV. Born in 1960, the young Hoey spent countless hours marinating in classic cartoons from Mighty Mouse to Betty Boop. He also soaked up a precious store of pop culture references (he can, for example, name the character Bob Denver played before Gilligan). He put all that to professional use as an illustrator, first for newspapers (the Denver Post, Hartford Courant and Washington Post) and later for magazines (including U.S. News, Fortune, Smart Money and Time). His pop-art-infused work relies on sly irony that never slips into cynicism. "I like it to be happy with a little bit of knowingness," says Hoey, who lives in San Francisco with his wife, Sylvia Chevrier. His renderings of some of the 101 things everyone should do before graduating start here.
"Of all the words PETER ROBINSON penned in four years as Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, six stand out: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Robinson says the State Department tried to censor the comments he wrote for the president's 1987 West Berlin visit. But the young scribe had captured Reagan's gut feelings, and the president stuck with him. Robinson, now 43 and a Hoover Institution fellow, hasn't lost his spunk. In 1994, he laid bare his disillusionment as a onetime Stanford Business School student in the book Postcards From Hell. His new book, excerpted here, is a warts-and-all anatomy of the GOP. At press time, he was peddling it at the Philadelphia convention.
