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ALUMNI UPDATES
Bill Minutaglio ’76: Journalist, Bush Biographer
By Kate Linthicum ’08 Barnard
On the first day of his freshman year at Columbia, Bill Minutaglio ’76, ’78J and the rest of his class convened on the quad for new-student orientation. One piece of advice stuck.
“A College dean told us to consider all of New York City our campus,” Minutaglio recalls. He says he realized then that there was an important education to be had outside of Columbia’s gates.
Minutaglio’s meanderings around the city shaped him as much as or more than the time he spent in the classroom. Those forays into Harlem, the Bronx and downtown Manhattan inspired in Minutaglio an attitude of inquiry that led to a nearly
30-year career as an award-winning journalist. He worked for 18 years as a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, writing about minority communities and traveling around the world when news broke, and he spent almost five years as a regional editor at People. On the side, he penned a well-received biography of President George W. Bush.
First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (1999) is an intimate character study of the future president. “He is not complex,” Minutaglio says of Bush, whom he interviewed for the book. “He sees the world in black and white.” The book, which portrays Bush as someone who always has struggled to follow in his powerful father’s footsteps, earned Minutaglio extensive national press coverage and critical acclaim. Dan Rather praised it as “fair, balanced, interesting and well-written,” and The Washington Post called it “a deft and convincing portrait.”
These days, Minutaglio is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where he’s able to spend time on his writing while also turning students on to what he calls the “secret” of journalism: “It’s a way to get behind the yellow police tape of life,” he says.
Minutaglio is a Texan now, and he has a soft country drawl to prove it. But his story began in Brooklyn, where he was born the youngest of five sons. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Long Island, and he enrolled at Chaminade, an all-boys Catholic high school. When he applied to Columbia, some were skeptical because of the school’s reputation for radicalism. “The head of my Catholic private school strongly, strongly urged me not to go there,” Minutaglio says. “It made me want to go there even more.”
Minutaglio majored in history and Asian studies. In one of his favorite classes, Ainslie Embree’s “Introduction to Indian Civilization,” he met the woman who would become his wife, Holly Williams ’79 Barnard, with whom Minutaglio has two children.
After graduating from the College, Minutaglio spent a year at SIPA before enrolling in the Journalism School. A few weeks after his graduation from there, he took a job at a newspaper in Abilene, Texas, where he reported on events such as rattlesnake roundups and rodeos. “It was just getting really close to the bone and the American heartland,” he remembers.
During the next several years, Minutaglio hop scotched to the San Antonio Express News, the Houston Chronicle and eventually the Dallas Morning News, where he wrote stories that won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Ellen Kampinsky, who is now the news editor at Glamour, worked with Minutaglio at the Dallas Morning News. “He was a wonderfully compassionate and witty writer,” she says. “Part of Bill’s magic was his ability to find stories that were so obvious you’d overlook them because they were right in front of your face, or, conversely, to seek out corners of the city no one else had bothered to explore.”
Eventually, Minutaglio moved to Austin to cover state politics. It was there, in the late 1990s, that a prescient publisher asked if he would write a book about then-Governor George W. Bush. During the next few years, while an editor in People’s Austin bureau, Minutaglio released City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle (2003) and The President’s Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales (2006).
Minutaglio now is working on a book about the civil rights movement and on a collection of essays about African-American life in Texas. He says Columbia piqued his interest in issues of race and class, and he praises the school for bringing typically disenfranchised people into the fold. “There’s so much historical evidence to show that Columbia was in the vanguard for really opening its doors to all walks of life and all colors of skin,” he says. “I’m proud to wear my Columbia T-shirt in Texas.”
Kate Linthicum ’08 Barnard is majoring in American studies.
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