J.F.O. McALLISTER

White House Correspondent
TIME Magazine
Washington Bureau

J.F.O. "Jef" McAllister became White House Correspondent for TIME Magazine in 1995. He is responsible for covering the range of President Clinton's foreign and domestic policies, the internal politics of his Administration and his reelection campaign. In his previous assignment as Diplomatic Correspondent, he regularly accompanied Secretaries of State James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Christopher on their foreign travels, and contributed to more than 40 cover stories on diplomacy.

While a student, McAllister worked as a stringer in TIME's Washington, London and Boston bureaus. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a concentration in American diplomatic history, afterwards working in Manila as a Luce Scholar for an Asian news service. As a Marshall Scholar he earned a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, and while there also wrote the memoirs of U. Alexis Johnson, an Ambassador to Japan and Under Secretary of State. From Oxford, McAllister went to law school at Yale, clerked for a federal judge and worked as a corporate lawyer in New York.

After returning to Washington D.C. in 1989 to cover the State Department for TIME, McAllister covered Gulf War diplomacy, the Middle East peace talks, the tensions over North Korea's nuclear program, U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and Russia and the U.S. deployments to Somalia and Haiti. He has written a cover story on atrocities in Bosnia, profiles of President Clinton's main foreign policy advisors, and articles about U.S. options in Bosnia, world trade negotiations, and normalizing ties with Vietnam. He speaks regularly with senior figures in the Administration, Capitol Hill and outside the government.

McAllister is married with three children, and lives in Great Falls, Virginia.