John King Speaker & Booking Information

John King is anchor of CNN's 7 p.m. ET program, John King, USA, and CNN's chief national correspondent. He most recently served as anchor of State of the Union with John King, a four-hour Sunday news program that offered a blend of newsmaker interviews, political analysis, national and world affairs, cultural segments, media analysis and commentary. King joined CNN in May 1997 and was appointed chief national correspondent in April 2005. He served as CNN's senior White House correspondent from 1999 to 2005. Since the launch of State of the Union in January 2009, King has interviewed a wide-range of key newsmakers, including President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney, who joined the program for his first television interview since returning to private life. Cheney's assertion on State of the Union that the policies of the new president had made Americans less safe continues to drive the national political dialogue months later. Additionally, King has made it a priority to travel outside of Washington each week to gather the voices of every day Americans and tell their stories, visiting all 50 states in the first year of the Obama presidency. As a member of the Peabody Award-winning “Best Political Team on Television,” King was a key part of the network's innovative “America Votes 2008” coverage of the presidential campaign. He traveled to important early election states to cover and interview major candidates and broke news about campaign developments, including that then-Senator Barack Obama had chosen Sen. Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate. He pioneered the use of the CNN “multi-touch” board, which allowed him to delve into election data and track delegates like never before for primary election nights. In advance of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, King reported and anchored a 90-minute documentary on Sen. John McCain as part of a two-part series on the presidential candidates. King also contributed to CNN's Emmy-winning 2006 mid-term election coverage as well as to coverage of the 2004 presidential race, the Iraq War, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the tax-cut debates of 2001and 2003 and the war on terrorism. In 2006, he reported an hour-long special on executive authority, “Power Play.” He has conducted one-on-one interviews with an array of senior officials, including President George W. Bush, first lady Laura Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. King traveled with Cheney to the Middle East in March 2002 as the administration began to build support for confronting Saddam Hussein. In December 2004, King traveled with Powell to Indonesia, Thailand and other South Asian countries, and then remained in the region to cover the disaster and aftermath of the tsunami that took more than 175,000 lives in the region. In 2005, King was among the CNN crew that covered the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita from the U.S. Gulf Coast. In June 2006, he accompanied President Bush on a secret trip to Baghdad during which the president met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the new cabinet. During the Clinton administration, King conducted an exclusive joint interview with President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair in Birmingham, England, in May 1998, as well as the only one-on-one interview with the President during his historic trip to Vietnam in November 2000. King also was CNN's lead reporter covering Vice President Al Gore in the closing weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign and during the post-election recount controversy, and he interviewed Gore on several occasions during the 2000 campaign cycle. The 2008 campaign was the sixth presidential election King covered. In addition to his domestic reporting, he has covered firsthand a number of major international events, including the first Persian Gulf War, the U.S. military operation to restore the Aristide government to Haiti and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa. He was among the first correspondents to report in 1991 from a liberated Kuwait and received the top reporting prize for his coverage of the 1991 Gulf War from the Associated Press Managing Editors' Association. Before joining CNN, King wrote for the Associated Press, which he joined in 1985. In 1991 he was named chief political correspondent and headed the AP's political coverage of the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. During his tenure there, King broke several major political stories, including Michael Dukakis' selection of Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate in 1988 and Clinton's selection of Al Gore in 1992. He broke the news of Gen. Colin Powell's decision not to run for president and Sen. Bob Dole's efforts to obtain Ross Perot's endorsement in 1996. King is a native of Boston and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Rhode Island.