Authors' Luncheon
March 4, 2006

Thomas B. Allen is an author whose writings range from articles for National Geographic Magazine to books on a variety of subjects. Allen’s most recent books are George Washington, Spymaster, which tells how espionage helped to win the Revolutionary War, and Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage.

Allen is the co-author, with Paul Dickson, of The Bonus Army: An American Epic, the story of the ill-fated World War I veterans who marched on Washington in 1932 and were driven out by Army troops under command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The book will be published by Walker and Company in February 2005. It is a selection of the History Book Club.

The New York Public Library has selected George Washington, Spymaster, as one of the 100 best children's books of 2004. An earlier Allen book, Remember Pearl Harbor, also published by National Geographic, was selected as one of the Notable Books of 2001 by the American Library Association.

Spy Book, co-authored with Norman Polmar, is the principal source book for the International Spy Museum. The revised 2003 edition has more than 100 new entries

As a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine, he has written on such subjects as Xinjiang China, Mongolia, and Turkey. His World War II articles covered D-Day, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, and the Battle of Midway. Other articles: the search for the giant squid, the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, and the search for Cuba's sunken treasure ships. The Geographic articles have been published in the Japanese, Israeli, Greek, and Latin American editions of the Magazine. He also lectures on National Geographic Expeditions to the sites of historic events, such as Pearl Harbor and D-Day.

Allen was Associate Chief of the National Geographic Society’s Book Service from 1974 until 1981, when he left the Society to freelance as a writer and editor. After leaving the Society he wrote for several Society books, including Field Guide to North American Birds, Inventors and Discoverers, Journey Into China, Into the Unknown, Exploring England and Ireland, Liberty: the Statue and the American Dream, America’s Outdoor Wonders, Photography Then and Now, and We Americans. During his career at the National Geographic Society, Allen worked as an editor and writer on twenty-eight Society books.

Allen was a consultant and on-screen speaker for the Documedia series “Secrets of War” for the History Channel. He has frequently appeared on television as an authority on military and intelligence subjects. He has also produced editorial contributions to web pages of the National Museum of American History, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Geographic Society, and Kodak.

His book Possessed reveals in detail the real exorcism that was the basis for the movie “The Exorcist.” Possessed was adapted for a Showtime movie of the same name. His Shark Attacks is an authoritative analysis of attacks throughout the world.

Prior to his work at the National Geographic Society, Allen was, from 1964 to 1965, Managing Editor, Trade Book Division, Chilton Books. From 1956 to 1963, he was a feature writer on The New York Daily News. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter and columnist for the Bridgeport (Conn.) Herald and served two years in the U.S. Navy.

He and his wife Scottie, a potter and member of Creative Partners Gallery, live in Bethesda, Maryland.

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 45 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history.

Dickson, born in Yonkers, NY, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1961 and was honored as a Distinguished Alumnae of that institution in 2001. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Navy and later worked as a reporter for McGraw-Hill Publications.
Since 1968, he has been a full-time freelance writer contributing articles to various magazines and newspapers, including Smithsonian, Esquire, The Nation, Town & Country, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post and writing numerous books on a wide range of subjects.

He received a University Fellowship for reporters from the American Political Science Association to do his first book, Think Tanks (1971). For his book The Electronic Battlefield (1976), about the impact automatic weapons systems have had on modern warfare, he received a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to support his efforts to get certain Pentagon files declassified.

His latest book, written with Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic was published by Walker and Co. on February 1, 2005. It tells the dramatic but largely forgotten story of the approximately 45,000 World War I veterans who marched on Washington in the summer of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, to demand early payment of a bonus promised them for their wartime service and of how that march eventually changed the course of American history and led to passage of the GI Bill-- the lasting legacy of the Bonus Army.

Dickson's most recent baseball book, The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of our National Pastime, also by Walker and Co, was first published in May, 2003 and came out in paperback in June, 2005. It follows other works of baseball reference including The Joy of Keeping Score, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, Baseball the President’s Game and The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, now in it's second edition. The original Dickson Baseball Dictionary was awarded the 1989 Macmillan-SABR Award for Baseball Research. Sputnik: the Shock of the Century, another Walker book, came out in October, 2001 and was subsequently issued in paperback by Berkeley Books. Like his first book, Think Tanks (1971), and his latest, Sputnik was born of his first love—investigative journalism.

Dickson is a founding member and former president of Washington Independent Writers and a member of the National Press Club. He is a contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine and a consulting editor at Merriam-Webster, Inc and is represented by Premier Speakers Bureau, Inc. and the Jonathan Dolger Literary agency.

He currently lives in Garrett Park, Maryland with his wife Nancy who works with him as his first line editor, and financial manager.

Jim Lehrer didn't always aspire to be a writer -- when he was 16, he wanted to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Since he wasn't a very good baseball player, he turned to sports writing, then writing in general. As a member of what he's called "the Hemingway generation," he decided to support himself as a newspaper writer until he could make a living as a novelist.

After graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism, Lehrer served for three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, then began his career as a newspaper reporter, columnist and editor in Dallas. His first novel, about a band of Mexican soldiers re-taking the Alamo, was published in 1966 and made into a movie. Lehrer quit his newspaper job in order to write more books, but was lured back into reporting after he accepted a part-time consulting job at the Dallas public television station. He was eventually made host and editor of a nightly news program at the station.

Lehrer then moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as public affairs coordinator for PBS and as a correspondent for the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT). At NPACT, Lehrer teamed up with Robert MacNeil to provide live coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings, broadcast on PBS. It was the beginning of a partnership that would last more than 20 years, as Lehrer and MacNeil co-hosted The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (originally The Robert MacNeil Report) from 1976 to 1983, and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from 1983 to 1995. In 1995, MacNeil left the show, but Lehrer soldiered on as solo anchor and executive editor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

When he wasn't busy hosting the country's first hour-long news program, Lehrer wrote and published books, including a series of mystery novels featuring his fictional lieutenant governor, One-Eyed Mack, and a political satire, The Last Debate. Lehrer surprised critics and won new readers with his breakout success, White Widow, the "tender and tragic" (Washington Post) tale of a small-town Texas bus driver. He followed it with the bestselling Purple Dots, a "high-spirited Beltway romp" (The New York Times Book Review), and The Special Prisoner, about a WWII bomber pilot whose brutal experiences in a Japanese P.O.W. camp come back to haunt him 50 years later. His recent novel No Certain Rest recounts the quest of a U.S. Parks Department archaeologist to solve a murder committed during the Civil War.

During the last four presidential elections, Lehrer has served as a moderator for nine debates, including all three of the presidential candidates' debates in 2000. He also hosted the Emmy Award-nominated program "Debating Our Destiny: Forty Years of Presidential Debates."

Lehrer lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, novelist Kate Lehrer. The two also have an 18th-century farmhouse close to the Antietam battle site. Visits to the site helped inspire Lehrer's thirteenth novel, No Certain Rest.