Walter Shapiro, Political Columnist With a Contrarian Streak, Dies at 77

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Walter Shapiro, a canny, penetrating and often contrarian political columnist whose career included stints as a presidential speechwriter, stand-up comic, professor, author and, as a recent college graduate, congressional candidate, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 77. The cause of his death, in a hospital, was an infection related to his recent treatment for cancer, his wife, the journalist and author Meryl Gordon, said. Mr. Shapiro’s lifelong passion for politics was piqued in 1962, when he was a high school student in Norwalk, Conn., and his mother gave him a copy of “The Making of the President 1960” by Theodore H. White. The next year, at 16, he took his first airplane flight to attend President John F. Kennedy’s funeral. He began his career in journalism at Congressional Quarterly and went on to write for Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, The New Republic and Esquire. He later wrote for Salon, Yahoo News, Politics Daily and Roll Call.