A small crowd had gathered outside Sever Hall, and as Theodore S. Stamas ’82 moved towards the throng of people, he could see his roommate, David E. Sanger ’82, in the middle of the fray.

Sanger, who was reporting for The Crimson, was trying to find out what had happened. Hoping to see if any major developments had occurred, the freshman had spent time asking students and faculty if they had any insight into what might have caused the building’s evacuation.

He soon found his answer: A small fire in the bottom of a trashcan.

“I remember the fact that it wasn’t much of a story,” Stamas recalls with a small chuckle, “but that was my first impression of David as a journalist: covering a wastebasket fire in Sever Hall.”

David E. Sanger '82

Twenty-five years later, Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, has two Pulitzer Prizes under his belt and has moved past covering burning wastebaskets to dictating the national news cycle as he covers the White House and American foreign policy.

As Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, says, “He certainly has a lot of influence on the agenda in Washington, particularly in foreign relations, nuclear proliferation—subjects he’s taken an interest in.”

Sanger’s years at Harvard were marked by his devotion to The Crimson and to a classmate he would later marry. Friends remember him as much for his intelligence as for his playful sense of humor.

Says Nicholas D. Kristof ’82, the Times columnist who was a close college friend of Sanger’s: “He managed the trifecta: good grades and serious scholarship; Crimson and other journalism; and being in a great relationship.”

‘SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES’

From the day that Sanger entered Johnston Gate from White Plains, N.Y., there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that he would become a journalist after graduation.

“We all sort of knew that he was a born and bred journalist,” says Stamas, now a managing director at Citigroup. “Some people are born knowing what they are going to do, and David was one of those people.”

As early as his high school days, where he would freelance articles for a weekly section of the Times, Sanger had been hooked on reporting.

“There aren’t many professions in the world that I can think of that enable you to seek that kind of inquiry,” he says. “You can do that in academia, but not with the same kind of effect.”

During his stay at Harvard, Sanger devoted much of his time to journalism, routinely spending his afternoons writing or hanging around The Crimson, an “intoxicating environment,” as he recalls.

Sanger wasn’t assigned to cover a specific area, and instead wrote on a wide spectrum of topics that ranged from the Harvard College Democrat’s election results to the activities of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

“He was extremely competent, organized, professional, and thinking ahead,” William E. McKibben ’82, a former Crimson president and former staff writer for The New Yorker, says. “He astounded us all by knowing what his course in life was even at that very early age.”

As a stringer for the Times in college he regularly contributed articles on stories dealing with the Boston area, including an incident when an airplane overshot the runway at Logan International Airport.

Kristof, who comped The Crimson the same year as Sanger, recalls that it didn’t take long for Sanger’s articles to catch to the eye of his classmates.

“David attracted everybody’s attention not only because he was a great journalist, but also because he was stringing for the New York Times—making us all green with envy,” Kristof wrote in an e-mail from China.

Sanger still recalls his excitement upon making the front page of the Times for the first time, despite the fact that his roommates were “so wonderfully jaded that they would never react to anything.”

“I remember picking it up off the entryway doorway in Lowell, since those were the days where the paper was still delivered to your door,” Sanger says. “It was a big thrill.”

But as a stringer, Sanger never got the chance to see his name get into the paper. Instead of listing him as the writer, the byline simply read “Special to The New York Times,” a byline he would come to adopt so often that his roommates used to tease him that if he ever wrote his autobiography, it should just be called “Special to The New York Times.”

A BLESSING IN DISGUISE

Sanger says that with the heavier course load and new environment, he found the transition from high school to Harvard to be particularly difficult.

“I remember going off to a counselor, who looked at me completely unsympathetically,” Sanger says. “He said you’d get used to it, and you know what, he was right.”

In November of his freshman year, Sanger, who was living in Canaday, headed across the dormitory to take a girl out on a date. When he knocked on the door, however, he instead found the girl’s roommate, Sherill A. Leonard ’82. He had been stood up.

“I remember being quite horrified because I knew exactly what had happened,” Leonard recalls of opening the door to find Sanger. “He was standing there all excited and eager-faced, and I thought ‘Oh my gosh, I have to crush his spirit.’ I had to let him down as easily as possible, so I talked to him for quite a bit to make sure that he would be okay.”

Leonard had seen Sanger from time to time on the stairs and during the fire drills, but this was the first time where they actually had a chance to talk to each other.

“That was the first conversation where we really laughed, even if I had to stumble to tell him that [my roommate] had dumped him for a better date,” she says.

The two were married in June of 1987. Sanger credits his future wife with helping him and Kristof pass a constitutional law course that the three had taken together.

“Sherill had actually done the reading,” he says, “So Nick and I figured out that if we were going to pass the exam, we better have Sherill join our small study group. It was because of Sherill that Nick and I actually surivived that test.”

FUNNY MAN

Though Sanger was known for his intelligence and his newspaper articles, his friends recall that he also had a good sense of humor.

During their junior year, Stamas, who had shared a bunk bed with Sanger the year before, fell asleep in the Lowell House library while he was studying. Sanger seized the moment, and surrounded Stamas with books stacked several feet high.

“When I woke up, I was surprised to discover that there was a wall of books that had been built around me,” Stamas remembers. “David had instigated and planned the whole thing.”

Sanger also helped welcome Leonard, whom he describes as having been a “very adorable Texan,” to the harsh New England winter.

The year that they arrived as freshmen, there was a blizzard that had paralyzed most of the state. Sanger called her to tell her to come outside to see the snow. When she hurriedly ran down the stairs, she was hit in the face with a snowball.

“I ran down the stairs, and there was David waiting for me,” Leonard says, laughing. “The next thing I know there was a big wet snowball in face. That was my initiation to the New England winter.”

But Sanger was also serious when it came to academics. Stamas recalls that he would often find Sanger in the library.

“He would underline his books with a ruler, and when he wasn’t underlining, he’d have a pencil in his mouth,” he says.

Majoring in government, Sanger, who graduated magna cum laude, says that the courses he took for his concentration, including introduction to comparative government, continue to be useful to this very day.

“I ended up meeting in international relations courses some people who are still around and who I still deal with,” he says, noting that the next time he saw Gary Samore—a Vice President and Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations—was as the “deputy North Korea negotiator.”

FROM TOKYO TO WASHINGTON

When Sanger graduated, he arrived at the Times to work as a business reporter covering the developing stages of the technology industry and personal computers.

When the Challenger space shuttle explosion occurred in 1986, Sanger’s articles led the way in exposing the causes of the disaster, as well as revealing the fact that NASA was aware of the potential flaws in the space shuttle’s design.

“David’s great skill in journalism is that he instinctively sees forests where others see trees,” Kristof explains. “He has an extraordinary ability to see patterns and narratives where others would only see a jumble of events.”

The team that was covering the Challenger explosion went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for national reporting. Sanger would later win another Pulitzer for his coverage of the struggles within the Clinton Administration over controlling exports to China.

After the space shuttle disaster, Sanger became the Tokyo bureau chief, which he recalls as one of the most intriguing times of his career.

“I did think that it’d be truly cool to be a foreign correspondent, and it was,” Sanger says. “There is a degree of freedom, and the right to roam the earth on somebody else’s nickel.”

In 1999, Sanger started covering the White House and national politics as the Times’ White House correspondent.

“Where so many mistakes have been made [by an administration]—particularly over the past two years—doing this at the Times affords you enormous access to people making the decision, but also tremendous responsibility because the echo effect is broad,” he says.

Keller says that Sanger has used his influential position to analyze political matters of inquiry and complication.

“He has the ability to explain things clearly,” he says. “I think if you had a dozen David Sanger’s, you could put out a pretty good paper.”

—Staff writer Kevin Zhou can be reached at kzhou@fas.harvard.edu.