David E. Hoffman is Contributing Editor at the Washington Post and has been a journalist for 30 years. He served as the Washington correspondent for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-News. He covered Ronald Reagan's campaign for the presidency in 1980, and was national economics correspondent for Knight-Ridder Newspapers. In 1982, he joined The Washington Post to cover the Reagan presidency. As a White House correspondent, he covered the major U.S.-Soviet summits of the Reagan years, including Geneva and Reykjavik, as well as domestic policy and politics. He also covered the George H. W. Bush presidency. Later, he was diplomatic correspondent at the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and then served as Jerusalem correspondent, covering the Oslo peace accords. From 1995 to 2001, he served as Moscow bureau chief. His first book was The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (PublicAffairs, 2002). On returning to Washington in 2001, he was Foreign editor and then Assistant Managing Editor for Foreign news, managing the Post's foreign service, until 2009. More recently, he was a correspondent for the PBS FRONLINE documentary, "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria."