Philip Terzian

Philip Terzian is Literary Editor of The Weekly Standard in Washington, DC. Born and raised in Kensington, Md., he attended the Sidwell Friends School in Washington and holds a BA in English from Villanova. He has done graduate work in history at Oxford and in theology at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia. While still an undergraduate he was a speechwriter for Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien. As a journalist for nearly 40 years, he has worked at the Anniston Star in Alabama and the Lexington Herald in Kentucky, the Reuters Washington bureau, was assistant editor of The New Republic, assistant editor of the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times, and editor of the editorial pages at The Providence Journal. At the Journal he also wrote a twice-weekly op-ed column, syndicated by the Scripps Howard News Service for nearly 20 years, and was a Pulitzer finalist in commentary. During 1978-79 he was a speechwriter for Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. He is a member of the American Council on Germany, has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a Pulitzer juror in commentary and international reporting. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement, Harper's, Commentary, Commonweal, The New Criterion, The Washington Post, The American Spectator, The London Daily Telegraph, and numerous other publications. He is also an amateur jazz pianist, collector of antiquarian books and manuscripts, and a whipper-in of the Wolver Beagles of Middleburg, Va. For several years he was the voice of Franklin D. Roosevelt for the FDR Library in Hyde Park, NY. Married to the former Grace Paine of Nashville, Tenn., who is VP/Communications at the Hudson Institute in Washington, he is the father of one son, Hillman, a student at Eastern Virginia Medical School, a one daughter, Gracie, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and lives in the Virginia suburbs of Washington.