William H. Greider ’58

Bill died Dec. 25, 2019, in Washington, D.C. He was 83.

He came to Princeton from Wyoming (Ohio) High School, where he went out for football and was on the newspaper staff and debate team.

At Princeton he was on The Daily Princetonian for four years, culminating in the managing editorship. He majored in English and was in Tiger Inn. He roomed with Jon Bunge, Bob Sklar, and Doc Mayo.

He served in the Army and was first employed by a small daily newspaper in Wheaton, Ill. In the 1970s he was a national reporter (later columnist and assistant managing editor) at The Washington Post. He may have been best known to the public in that period as the author of a 1981 piece in The Atlantic Monthly, a tell-all confession by President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, of chaotic decision-making within the Office of Management and Budget and an admission by Stockman that “none of us really understands what is going on with all these numbers.”

Bill wrote political columns at Rolling Stone from 1982 to 1999. He was then a writer for The Nation until he retired in the summer of 2018. He was also a correspondent for Frontline documentaries on PBS. He wrote eight books; one of the best regarded was Secrets of the Temple (1988).

Bill is survived by his wife, Linda; two children, Cameron and Katharine ’88; and four grandchildren. The class extends its deepest sympathy to them all.