AUTHOR

Ann Blackman

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR OFF TO SAVE THE WORLD: How Julia Taft Made A Difference is Ann Blackman’s fourth biography. Her earlier books include Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright,(Scribner/Simon & Schuster, 1998; The Spy Next Door (co-author) about the secret life of FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen (Little Brown, 2002),and Wild Rose, the story of Civil War spy Rose O’Neale Greenhow (Random House, 2005). In her long career as a news correspondent for TIME magazine and the Associated Press, Blackman specialized in presidential politics, cultural trends, the changing role of women and profiles of the powerful personalities that make up Washington society. She also covered the Iranian hostage crisis, the Watergate hearings and the assassination attempts on Governor George Wallace and President Ronald Reagan. During the height of Watergate, Blackman's AP interview with Julie Nixon produced the news that Nixon was talking to the Lincoln portrait and playing the piano at night in the dark hallways of the White House. During the assassination attempt on George Wallace, she filed the first AP bulletin that he had been paralyzed from the waist down. During the assassination attempt on Reagan, she filed the first bulletin that he had been hit. (Her husband, AP White House correspondent Michael Putzel, was a few feet from Reagan at the time and filed the first bulletin that the president had been shot at.) Blackman joined TIME's Washington bureau in 1985 as deputy bureau chief. She also spent three years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent for the magazine, covering the Gorbachev years and the break-up of the Soviet Union. In her biography of Civil War spy Rose Greenhow, Blackman used her reporting skills to uncover the extraordinarily rich and detailed diary that Greenhow kept when Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent her on a dangerous journey on the blockade runner, Phantom, to Europe as his secret ambassador. Her mission: to plead the Confederate cause at the royal courts of England and France. Rose recorded her travels, moods, gossip and love affairs, and of course, her conversations with British and French leaders and the elite members of European society. A year later, on the perilous ocean voyage home, her blockade runner, Condor, ran aground as it approached the Cape Fear River, and Rose was washed overboard. Around her neck was a bag filled with $2000 in gold coins, meant for the Confederate Army. At dawn the next day, Rose's lifeless body washed up on the beach at Fort Fisher. Confederate heroine Rose Greenhow was carried through the streets of Wilmington, N.C. in a flag-draped coffin. She was buried amid the towering oaks and delicate pink magnolias of Oakdale Cemetery, where her grave stands today. Blackman is married to journalist and author Michael Putzel. They have two married children and live in Washington, D.C., and on the coast of Maine.