William Greider, Journalist Who Focused on Economy, Dies at 83

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/business/media/william-greider-dead.html

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William Greider, a reporter, editor and popular author who examined the United States, its politics and its position in the world through an economic lens for four decades for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Nation and other media outlets, died on Wednesday at his home in Washington. He was 83.

His son, Cameron, said the cause was complications of congestive heart failure.

Mr. Greider worked for 15 years at The Post, where he was a national correspondent, an assistant managing editor for national news and a columnist.

His writing then took a more polemical and leftward turn at Rolling Stone, where, as a columnist and national affairs editor from 1982 to 1999, he began investigating the defense establishment and challenging mainstream political and economic thought.

He joined The Nation in 1999 as the national affairs correspondent and was also a correspondent for six “Frontline” documentaries on PBS, including “Return to Beirut,” which won an Emmy in 1985.

Mr. Greider’s best-known books include “One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism” (1997), about the global economy; “Secrets of the Temple” (1987), a critique of the Federal Reserve system; “Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy” (1992), which laid bare how powerful interests had co-opted the political system so that it would work for them and not for the working class; and “The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy” (2003), in which he took a hard look at American capitalism and discussed ways of reforming it.

Reviewing “The Soul of Capitalism” in The New York Times, the journalist John B. Judis called it “a bold and ambitious attempt to remedy the lack of vision that has plagued the American left since the decline of New Deal liberalism.”

But perhaps Mr. Greider’s most influential piece of writing was an essay in The Atlantic in 1981 titled “The Education of David Stockman,” which caused a national uproar.

Mr. Stockman was a young Michigan Republican who served briefly in Congress before becoming President Ronald Reagan’s budget director. Branded the “whiz kid” of the administration, he was in charge of implementing Reagan’s plan to balance the federal budget by 1984 while cutting income taxes and social spending and increasing military spending.

In a series of interviews with Mr. Greider, Mr. Stockman revealed his skepticism about the supply-side theory of economics, on which the plan was based, and admitted that it had caused considerable doubt and confusion within the administration.

“None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” Mr. Stockman told Mr. Greider in one of several damning passages.

The essay won the George Polk Award for magazine writing and was reprinted as part of Mr. Greider’s subsequent book, “The Education of David Stockman and Other Americans” (1982), a broader indictment of Reaganomics and its shortcomings.

Before Reagan named him his vice-presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush had called this approach “voodoo economics,” saying Reagan’s policies would greatly increase the national debt. Mr. Greider’s account was one of the first to explain what was actually going on behind the administration’s curtain.

“Greider’s narrative is now a piece of history,” the historian Bruce Mazlish wrote in The New Republic. Mr. Greider’s essay, he said, was “destined to appear in future anthologies of politics, for it raises fundamental issues of faith, loyalty, betrayal, morality and personality.”

William Harold Greider was born on Aug. 6, 1936, in Cincinnati. His father, Harold William Greider, was a research chemist, and his mother, Gladys (McClure) Greider, was a teacher.

He was raised in Wyoming, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, and went on to study at Princeton, where he majored in English and served as associate editor of The Daily Princetonian, the campus newspaper. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1958.

Asked in a 2009 interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly if the university had shaped his political philosophy, Mr. Greider said no.

“I grew up a conservative Republican in the Robert Taft mold,” he said. “What changed me was after graduation, when I went out as a reporter and quickly began to experience the broader world. That led me to appreciate things I had once despised, such as the New Deal and liberal economics.”

He started his newspaper career at The Wheaton Daily Journal in Illinois, where he met his future wife, Linda Furry, when they were both reporters there. They married in 1961 and had a son, Cameron, and a daughter, Katharine.

They all survive him, as do his sister, Nancy Gluck, and four grandchildren. His brother David died in 1966 and his brother Richard died in 2006.

Mr. Greider worked for The Louisville Times, covering City Hall and the Kentucky state house, and in 1966 was sent to Washington for both The Times and The Louisville Courier-Journal. He moved over to The Washington Post in 1968.

His son said Mr. Greider’s early years at The Post, when he expanded his horizons by reporting from American Indian reservations and covering the civil rights and labor movements, were among the most meaningful to him as a journalist.

“He was disaffected from the day-to-day mechanics of politics,” Cameron Greider said, “but he was never disaffected from the notion that America could live up to its promise.”