A trailblazing journalist and meticulous archivist, Richard L. Strout, a descendant of Christopher, was raised in Brooklyn, NY and received his Master’s in Economics from Harvard in 1923.

Soon after, he became a national correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

Strout wrote a column for the New Republic for 40 years, documenting D.C. life from 1943-1983. Strout’s highlight collection, TRB: Views and Perspectives on the Presidency, was published in 1979 and is still in print. During his time at Christian Science Monitor and the New Republic, Strout won the George Polk Memorial Award for National Reporting (1958), the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement (1973) and a special Pulitzer Prize for Journalism (1978).

The late Bill Moyers wrote that Strout’s dispatches during this time were “chronicles of American history as milestones in the evolution of our nation’s capital— from a ‘small town’ to the nerve center of the free world.”

Strout has been credited as one of the first major journalists to express concern about an “imperial presidency.”