Paul Richter has written about national affairs and foreign policy for four decades. As a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, he was based in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC, and reported from sixty countries. During his years in Los Angeles he was principal author of California and the American Tax Revolt: Proposition 13 Five Years Later. His last book was The Ambassadors: America's Diplomats on the Front Lines. The volume won the American Academy of Diplomacy's Douglas Dillon Award for Books of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy. He lives in the Washington, DC, area.