Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas Edwin "Tom" Ricks (born September 25, 1955) is an American journalist and author specializing in military and national security issues. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting winner as part of teams from the Wall Street Journal (2000) and Washington Post (2002). He has reported on military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

He previously wrote a blog for Foreign Policy and is a member of the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy think tank. Ricks lectures widely to the military and is a member of Harvard University's Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military Relations. Ricks is the author of several nonfiction books, including Making the Corps (1997); the bestselling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) and its follow-up, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (2009); the bestselling First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (2020); and Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (2022).

Ricks was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, and grew up in New York and Afghanistan, one of six children. He is the son of Anne and David Frank Ricks, a professor of psychology. He attended the American International School in Kabul (1968–1970), including his freshman year of high school. He graduated from Scarsdale High School (1973).

After earning a B.A. from Yale University (1977), he was an instructor at Lingnan College, Hong Kong (1977–1979) and assistant editor at the Wilson Quarterly (1979–1981). At the Wall Street Journal, he was a reporter (1982–1985) and deputy Miami bureau chief (1986). In Washington, D.C., he was a Journal reporter (1987–1989), feature editor (1989–1992), and Pentagon correspondent (1992–1999). He was a military correspondent at the Washington Post (2000–2008).

While at the Wall Street Journal, he was one of the reporters writing the "Price of Power" series discussing United States defense spending and potential changes confronting the US military following the Cold War. The series won the Journal the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He won a second Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as part of The Washington Post team for reporting about the beginnings of the U.S. counteroffensive against terrorism.

Ricks was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks was immensely critical of Fox News' coverage of the 2012 Benghazi attack. While being interviewed by Jon Scott, Ricks accused Fox News of being "extremely political" in its coverage of the attack and stated, "Fox was operating as a wing of the Republican Party."