Douglass Cater, Special Assistant to the President, was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on August 24, 1923. He was educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and the Harvard School of Public Administration.
Mr. Cater served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He became Washington editor for The Reporter in 1950. While with The Reporter, he took occasional leaves of absence to work in the national government--as special assistant to the Secretary of the Army, 1951, and as consultant to the director of the Mutual Security Agency, 1952. Mr. Cater left his editor's post when he became Special Assistant to President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1955 Mr. Cater was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the interaction of press and government in Washington. In 1957-1958 he spent nearly a year traveling around the world on an Eisenhower Fellowship. Mr. Cater was a Fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for Advanced Studies in 1961, and a visiting professor of public affairs at Wesleyan in 1963. He also held a visiting professorship at Princeton in 1959.
Mr. Cater is the author of Ethics in a Business Society (with Marquis Childs), 1953; The Fourth Branch of Government, 1959; and Power in Washington, 1964. He received the George Polk Memorial Award and the New York Newspaper Guild Page One Award in 1961.
Mr. Cater is married to the former Libby Anderson. They have four children.
