Bill Thomas (American writer, born 1943)

Bill Thomas
Bill Thomas
Born	June 1, 1943; Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Author, Journalist
Known for	Writing about Congress

Bill Thomas

Comment: There is only one source in this article, and the link to it seems to be broken. --Slon02 (talk) 19:37, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Comment: Seems to have been fixed Mr. R00t ^Talk 19:06, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Bill Thomas is an American author and journalist. An authority on Congress, Thomas has appeared in numerous media outlets discussing Washington politics. He has also written acclaimed books on the legal profession, capitalism in Russia and the corrupting influence of money on Capitol Hill. Thomas is currently running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Maryland’s 8th District.

Biography

Bill Thomas was born in Chicago and moved with his family to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he graduated from DeMatha High School. After attending the University of Maryland for a year, he traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area and, as a member of the United Auto Workers union, labored on the assembly line at a General Motors plant in Oakland, California. Returning to the University of Maryland, he received a B.A. in English in 1966. Following Ph.D. studies in English at the University of Washington in Seattle, he was an assistant professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Goucher College in Baltimore and Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.

Thomas began his journalism career as a writer at Congressional Quarterly in Washington. He has been a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, a columnist for Roll Call and The Hill newspapers in Washington, and an editor with the London-based Economist Group. He has been the editor of The Washington Weekly, Dossier magazine and Capital Style magazine published by The Economist in Washington.

Thomas’ articles and essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, National Geographic and many other publications. He has covered civil wars in three former Soviet republics, street demonstrations in Iran and a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway. Recent assignments have taken him to the Gulf Coast, the U.S.-Mexico border, South Africa and the Republic of Georgia, where in 2005 he was honored with that country’s highest literary award for his writing about Georgian politics and culture.

Thomas has lectured about Congress, Russia and the American media to audiences in the United States and abroad. Since 1994, he has moderated and spoken at national security training programs for the Defense Department, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. (2) He has hosted a radio talk show and been interviewed on many broadcast networks, among them CNN, CBS, ABC, Fox News, PBS, C-SPAN, BBC and Al Arabiya.

Work

Thomas’ books reflect his career-long interest in politics, economics and how a misplaced trust in “experts” can have calamitous as well as amusing consequences. The New York Time Book Review called his first book Lawyers and Thieves (Simon & Schuster) a “wry, witty, eloquent” look at the practice of law. Written with the late trial attorney Roy Grutman, whose list of clients included Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione and Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, Lawyers and Thieves, according to The Wall Street Journal, is an “entertaining expose” of the legal profession, from the seamy world of New York personal-injury lawyers to the highest court in the land. The Los Angeles Times said Lawyers and Thieves, “has the quality of hard-boiled mystery fiction, tough, knowing and full of dirty little secrets.”

Red Tape: Adventure Capitalism in the New Russia (Dutton) details how business is done of in Russia. Fraud, extortion, even murder are all normal risks in any Russian business deal. Drawing on more than 25 extended trips to Russia and the former Soviet republics, Thomas and co-author Charles Sutherland, said Kirkus Reviews, have written “a breezy, street-wise guide…that does for the New Russia what P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores did for the U.S. government.”

Thomas launched and wrote “Heard of the Hill,” Roll Call newspaper’s widely read political-insider column. Based on his years experience writing about Congress, his book Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill (Scribner’s) was praised by The Washington Post as “timely…entertaining…required reading.” The American Lawyer called it “a sprawling and ribald collection of salacious scandals.” And the late Sen. William Proxmire (D-WS) said this of Club Fed: “I thought my thirty-one years in the Senate had taught all I wanted to laugh about in Washington, until I read Club Fed. How wrong I was! Bill Thomas makes our capital even more hysterically funny than I has ever realized.”

In Capital Confidential (Pocket Books, 1996) Thomas surveys dozens of twentieth-century Washington scandals from the 1905 murder of a U.S. senator by his jealous girlfriend to the 1990s when Bill Clinton turned the White House into a frat house and a record 15 members of Congress were sent to prison for crimes committed in office. The Prez, an Off-Broadway musical about President Warren Harding, directed by Tom O’Horgan, Broadway director of Hair, Lenny and Jesus Christ, Superstar, is based in part on a chapter in Capital Confidential.

Personal Life

Thomas, who grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, is married to Irina Thomas, a realtor in the Washington area. They live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They have a son Brendan and a daughter Lena.