Featured Luminary: Christopher Ogden
Chris Ogden is a best-selling biographer who for many years was Time magazine’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. Although he’s hardly as old as this might make him appear, Chris was a journalist for more thirty years, nearly all at Time which he joined in 1973 as a correspondent in Moscow. Since then, he has reported from almost every part of the world - from China to Chile, Alaska to Africa and Washington to the West Bank.
As Time’s White House correspondent and national political correspondent, he covered six U.S. presidents - from Gerald Ford to George W. Bush. As the magazine’s chief diplomatic writer, he dealt with global leaders and Secretaries of State from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell. For a dozen years, he wrote the “View from Washington” column for Time’s international editions.
Overall, Chris was the primary contributor to more than 100 Time cover stories. He is the magazine’s only writer credited with a cover photo, a picture of Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn which was displayed in the National Portrait Gallery.
Retired recently from Time, he continues to lecture often on foreign affairs and to write books. Life of the Party, his biography of Pamela Harriman, known in some circles as the Courtesan of the Century, spent five months on the New York Times best-seller list and became a television movie.
Legacy, his epic saga of the billionaire Annenberg family, was a Los Angeles Times best-seller. It was judged “masterful” by the Washington Post, “a great book” by the Boston Globe and “elegant” by the New York Times.
Maggie, his first book, was a biography of Margaret Thatcher with whom he traveled and often interviewed in the 1980s while he was Time bureau chief in London and she was Britain’s prime minister. Cat’s Paw, his current project, is set in wartime London.
A Rhode Island native and a 1966 graduate of Yale, Chris is also a U.S. Army veteran who served as an intelligence officer in Asia during the Vietnam War.