黛布拉·布鲁诺
2018年2月19日
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In a city full of big egos, 乔恩·德克尔’s recent achievement might be hard to top.
The only daily member of the White House press corps with a law degree, the Fox 靠谱的滚球平台 Radio correspondent found out late last year that he had passed the D.C. 靠谱的滚球平台资格考试.
That not only led to a shout-out in Politico’s Playbook, the go-to newsletter for Washington political insiders, but on December 5 it got the attention of White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.
A reporter asked Sanders if President Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice, and whether the White House’s legal counsel had looked into that question.
Sanders responded, “I’m not an attorney. And as far as I know, only 乔恩·德克尔 in the room is.笑声响起.
“And so if you want to ask him legal questions, you certainly can,” Sanders added.
That’s exactly what Decker, 50, 希望会实现, if not among the other members of the press corps, at least from listeners of Fox radio and viewers of Fox television, who might have questions about a range of legal issues.
How Decker got to be the only White House reporter with a law degree is a meandering story. A White House reporter since 1995, first with PBS’s Nightly Business Report (now produced by CNBC), Decker started his career as a financial analyst on Wall Street. “It was what you did in the ’80s,他说. “I was not thinking, Is this what I really want to do?” he adds, although he realized after just a year that it wasn’t for him.
He went back to school to study international relations. While he was doing that, he started working as an assistant press secretary for Sen. John Heinz, the moderate Pennsylvania Republican who was the heir to the H.J. 亨氏公司.
Heinz was killed in a plane accident on April 4, 1991, a date Decker recites instantly. 事实上, Decker was on his way to pick up the senator at the airport when he got the news that Heinz and others, including some children on the ground, died in a mid-air collision with a helicopter.
That tragedy offered Decker a chance to examine what he might want to do next. “It was the end of a job I enjoyed—I really believed in what he believed in,” Decker says. “I decided in that moment to make a decision to either work for another politician or to pursue what I thought was my passion — journalism.”
多年来, he worked for NBC in Miami and Washington, 对于路透社来说, 天狼星XM收音机, 和PBS, where he first worked for the Nightly Business Report and then as host for the show This Week in Business.
他搬到了D区.C. in 1995 to cover the White House, and has been here ever since. More than 20 years ago, it didn’t take as long for a reporter to get a “hard pass” to cover the White House, the laminated card that lets journalists enter the White House briefing room without going through a complicated security protocol each time. 从那时起, he’s covered the White House under 12 press secretaries and four administrations, eventually moving over to Fox Radio. He also contributes to Fox Business TV.
几年前, Decker decided that a law degree would set him apart and let him explain legal issues—with confidence—to his audience. “When there are questions on executive orders or the constitutionality of the president’s travel ban or when Supreme Court decisions are handed down, Fox depends on me to provide insight,他说. His goal is to explain and distill concepts for the average listener who might not have any legal expertise.
It took Decker three and a half years of night classes at The George Washington University Law School (helped by a small tuition stipend from Fox). He timed it so that he would finish the course work before the beginning of the 2016 presidential election cycle, which meant finishing by December 2015. 在那之后, he had to figure out when he could take the bar exam.
在他完成之后, the first available bar exam date was February 2016, in the middle of primary season. The second time it was offered was July 2016, in the midst of political conventions. The third time was February of 2017, just after the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Decker realized there would always be some reason not to take the exam, so he settled on July 2017.
Once he started studying, he put in a regular workday that ended at 5 p.m. 在那之后, he’d remain in his snug radio booth in the press area of the White House where he’d study for three hours straight, 星期一至星期五. On weekends he’d study from 5 a.m. 到5点或6点.m. 没有间断.
他通过了. “For all of the things I’ve done professionally, I think it’s the biggest accomplishment of my life,他说. But he has no plans to actually practice law. Having a law degree “opens doors,他说, but he’s plenty busy with the White House, with serving on the board of the White House Correspondents Association, and with his love of tennis.
He and his wife recently returned from a trip to Australia, where they took in the Australian Open, completing what he calls the “Decker Slam” goal of visiting all of the tennis opens.
He would also like to improve his French, although that may be tough in a time when the news cycle is so fast. A big story in the past would last 24 hours; now it often changes by the hour, he says. “The president tweets on North Korea, and we focus on that. And then he makes a statement on Iran, and we’re off in a different direction.”
Even with the chaos, he says, “There’s not a day I don’t take it for granted. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
