Elisabeth Bumiller

Elisabeth Bumiller (born May 15, 1956) is an American author and journalist who served as the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times from September 2015 until November 2024.

Early life and education Bumiller was born in Aalborg, Denmark to a Danish mother, Gunhild Bumiller Rose, and an American father, Theodore R. Bumiller. Her mother was a nurse and her father an adventure-film photographer and producer.

Bumiller then attended Northwestern University as an undergraduate in the Medill School of Journalism, graduating in 1977. Her first journalism job in Washington was party reporter for The Washington Posts "Style" section, where she covered Washington society. At a panel discussion sponsored by Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in November 2004, Bumiller stated: "You can't just say the president is lying...You can in an editorial, but I'm sorry, you can't in a news column...You can say Mr. Bush's statement was not factually accurate. You can't say the president is lying—that's a judgment call."

Beginning in June 2006, Bumiller took a one-year leave of absence from the Times to write a biography of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During this period, Bumiller was also a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (September 2006—February 2007) and a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Bumiller's book, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, was published by Random House in December 2007. The book, which was based on ten interviews with Rice Jacob Heilbrunn, reviewing the book in The New York Times, wrote that Bumiller "brings a keen eye to Rice, probing not only her tenure as a policy maker and her close ties to George W. Bush, but also her personal and professional past. From 2008 to early 2013, Bumiller served as Pentagon correspondent; in this role, she traveled with the Secretary of Defense and was embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. and Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that editors should have taken a more skeptical approach.

Subsequently, Bumiller was named Washington editor. In September 2015, executive editor Dean Baquet of The New York Times announced that Bumiller would replace Carolyn Ryan as the Washington bureau chief. They have two children: a girl born in Japan and their second child, a boy was born after the couple moved to New York in the early 1990s.