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Nebraska Authors

Marianne Means

Born 1934-06-13 Sioux City, IA (USA)

Died 2017-12-02
Washington, DC (USA)

A famed political columnist and pioneering woman journalist who worked as a White House correspondent. She was born in Iowa but attended the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1956 having served as managing editor of the Daily Nebraskan. She worked for the Lincoln Journal from 1955 to 1957 as a copy and wire editor. She then moved on to newspapers in the Washington, D.C. area. Having been assigned by Hearst Newspapers to cover the Kennedy campaign she returned to the University of Nebraska during Kennedy's campaign visit, to escort Kennedy along with Kennedy's advisor Theodore Sorenson, with whom Means was already acquainted. Her national reporting on the visit, and Kennedy's ensuing request that she be assigned as White House correspondent, are said to have helped establish her as an influential journalist.

Places Lived

Sioux City, IA
Lincoln, NE
Washington DC

Author Of

  • Journalism
  • Nonfiction

Keywords

Newspaper Columnist; President's Spouses; Politics and Social Customs

Education

BA, 1956, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
JD, 1977, George Washington University, Washington, DC

Occupation

Journalist, columnist

Places Worked

Hearst Newspapers

Bibliography

The Woman in the White House : The Lives, Times and Influence of Twelve Notable First Ladies. 1963.

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