HEDRICK SMITH
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND CORRESPONDENT

Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times correspondent and author of several best-selling books, has created and hosted twelve award-winning PBS prime-time specials and mini-series on Washington’s power game, Soviet perestroika, the global economy, education, and teen violence. Last October, PBS devoted an entire prime-time evening to his pre-election special on U.S. health care, Critical Condition With Hedrick Smith, recently nominated for an Emmy. His newest PBS production, Juggling Work and Family, airs nationwide in prime time on Sept. 16, 2001.

During Black History Month of 2000, Mr. Smith hosted and executive-produced a special historical documentary, Duke Ellington's Washington on the capital's extraordinary African American community and the beginning of the Duke's remarkable jazz career. That program has won several awards.

Mr. Smith began creating documentary series for PBS in 1989 with an adaptation from his best-selling book, The Power Game: How Washington Works. Both the book and the documentary series are widely used in university, college and high school courses on government. His second documentary series, Inside Gorbachev's USSR, broadcast on PBS in 1990, built on his experience as Moscow Bureau Chief for The Times in the 1970s, on his best selling book, The Russians, and on his subsequent coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika.

For 26 years, Mr. Smith served as a correspondent for the New York Times in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the American South. In 1971, as chief diplomatic correspondent, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. From 1976-1988, he was New York Times Washington bureau chief and chief correspondent.

In September 1999, after deadly violence at several U.S. public schools, Smith produced a three-hour prime-time special, Seeking Solutions, that broke new ground by showing effective grass roots responses in six American communities to teen violence, gangs, street crime and hate crime. The program won the 1999 TV public service award from Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism society.

In 1998, Smith's Surviving the Bottom Line examined how middle class Americans were affected by the global economy. It also showed how some businesses and communities save companies and jobs and prepare young Americans to compete in the 21st Century economy. This series built on an earlier award-winning series, Challenge to America (1994), that examined the different ways that Germany, Japan and American compete in the global economy.

For the 1996 PBS election-year Democracy Project, Mr. Smith served as correspondent and executive producer of the documentary and discussion series, The People and the Power Game, broadcast nationwide in the fall of 1996. The mini-series analyzed the four major power centers in the American system: the President, Congress, the media, and lobbies.

His series Inside Gorbachev's USSR won the DuPont-Columbia grand prize in 1991 for the most outstanding public affairs production on U.S. television. Another series, The Power Game (1989), won international recognition, and his inner city documentary, Across the River (1995), about community building in crime-plagued neighborhoods within the nation's capital, won several awards. PBS viewers saw Mr. Smith for 25 years as a principal panelist on Washington Week in Review and have also seen him as a special correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Hedrick Smith has published several national best-selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988), The New Russians (1990) and Rethinking America (1995). He began his newspaper career with The Greenville (S.C.) News. After completing his B.A. at Williams College and doing graduate work at Oxford University, he worked for Universal Press International in Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta, 1959-62, and for the New York Times, 1962-88.