Nicholas von Hoffman

Nicholas von Hoffman (born October 16, 1929 in New York City) is an American journalist and author. He worked as a community organizer for Saul Alinsky in Chicago for ten years from 1953 to 1963. He wrote for the Washington Post. Later, TV audiences knew him as a "Point-Counterpoint" commentator for CBS's 60 Minutes, from which Don Hewitt fired him in 1974. He is a columnist for The Huffington Post.

He is of German-Russian extraction, descendant of Melchior Hoffman and son of Carl von Hoffman. Von Hoffman never went to college. In the 1950s, he worked on the research staff of the Industrial Relations Center of the University of Chicago and then for Alinsky as a field representative of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, where his best known role was as lead organizer for The Woodlawn Organization (TWO).Ben Bradlee, then the editor of the Post, hired him from the Chicago Daily News.

At the Post he was a brilliant reporter, and wrote an incendiary column for the paper's Style section. In her memoirs, Katharine Graham, then the newspaper's publisher, wrote of him: “My life would have been a lot simpler had Nicholas von Hoffman not appeared in the paper.” She added, however, that "I firmly believed that he belonged at the Post."

Beginning in 1979 and continuing throughout the '80s, von Hoffman recorded more than 250 radio commentaries, audio op-eds in the sardonic style he used on 60 Minutes. These commentaries were broadcast on the nationally syndicated daily radio program, Byline, which was sponsored by the Cato Institute. Subjects of von Hoffman's audio op-eds included the 1984 Democratic primary candidates, the Reagan administration's foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East, and the cynical, self-serving misuse of language by politicians.

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