The Chronicle has posted a nice story on John Williams, who once wrote the Chronicle‘s politics column but left in 2004 to work for James Baker:
The Iraq Study Group Report rocketed to No. 2 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list Thursday. But the names of its two Houston authors, and two other co-writers, are nowhere on the cover.
In fact, the four men, aides to the co-chairmen of the Study Group, go unmentioned until Page 142 — the last page of the book version.
The Houstonians are Edward Djerejian, the director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, and John Williams, an assistant to Baker, the former secretary of state and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group with former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton.
Djerejian and Williams, along with two of Hamilton’s aides, toiled in obscurity while the co-chairmen got the headlines. But they had major roles in what promises to be a focal point of the debate about Iraq.
The aides began tossing around ideas about how to fashion the report on a flight back to the U.S. from Baghdad, where members of the Study Group spent the Labor Day holiday talking with Iraqi and U.S. officials.
Williams, a former Houston Chronicle reporter, said the aides were determined to write the report in a direct and fast-paced way.
“We wanted people to be able to read it in a sitting,” he said.
In early October, the four men convened on the Rice University campus to sketch an outline of the report. They eventually produced 15 drafts before the final version was unveiled with great fanfare Wednesday in Washington.
The story ends with the sort of fluff that we expect from the Chronicle‘s D.C. bureau:
“We had the world’s two toughest and best editors — James Baker and Lee Hamilton,” Williams said.
Now, Williams quipped, “I would like to get out on the golf course in the next couple of weeks or see my children.”
Hey, maybe he can catch up with Chron editor Jeff Cohen!
So, now that the writers have been lauded by the Chronicle for their efforts, does that render moot the headline claim that they are “unheralded authors?”
