Meacham was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His parents are Jere Ellis Meacham, a construction and labor-relations executive who was decorated for valor during the Vietnam War, and Linda Brodie. His paternal grandparents, Ellis K. Meacham and Jean Austin Meacham, raised him after his parents' divorce. When he was a child, his grandfather had discussions each morning with a group of men about local and national politics. As a result, Meacham developed an interest in politics. He received an invitation to Ronald Reagan's 1981 inauguration in Washington, D.C. in response to a letter that he sent to the president-elect. He was educated at The McCallie Schoolprep school, where he developed an interest in the civil rights movement. He earned a bachelor's degree from in 1991.
Career
Journalist and editor
After college, he worked at The Chattanooga Times, until he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1993 and became co-editor of Washington Monthly. In 1995, he worked for Newsweek as the national affairs editor, and became Managing Editor in late-1998. In 2006, he became Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek's print and online formats. A former Executive Editor and Executive Vice President at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, and a contributing editor to Time magazine.
Historian and book author
He was the editor for Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement that was released in 2001. Spanning the period from 1941 to 1998, the book includes writings of noted civil-rights leaders, novelists, and journalists, like John Lewis, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, and David Halberstam. His book, Franklin and Winston, Partners of an Intimate Relationship about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, was released in 2003. Meacham has explored America's leaders in such works as Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power as well as his biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Jill Abramson of The New York Times finds that Meacham's books are well-researched and contain a combination of current historical interpretations and anecdotal information, and capture the character of former presidents from a heroic perspective, despite their personal flaws. In his biography of Jefferson, Meacham identifies qualities that would be helpful in the current political arena, "Jefferson repeatedly reached out to his enemies and showed ideological flexibility." Regarding the former president's stance on slavery, Meacham states, "Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson's sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform." Selected by the Bush family to be the official biographer for George H. W. Bush, Meacham's book, , was published in 2015. He gave eulogies for both President Bush and Barbara Bush when they died in 2018.
Other
From May 2010 to April 2011, Meacham was co-host with Alison Stewart of Need to Know on PBS. He is also a frequent guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe and has appeared multiple times on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. Meacham taught history at his alma mater, the University of the South, in 2014. He was a visiting professor of political science at Vanderbilt University before being appointed to the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in American Presidency.
