Laura Ingraham - Career

Career

Ingraham grew up in a middle-class family in Glastonbury, Connecticut and graduated from Glastonbury High School in 1981.

Ingraham earned a bachelor's degree at Dartmouth College in 1985 and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1991. As a Dartmouth undergraduate, she was a staff member of the independent conservative newspaper, The Dartmouth Review. In her senior year, she was the newspaper's editor-in-chief, its first female editor. She wrote a few controversial articles during her tenure, notably an article alleging racist and unprofessional behavior by a Dartmouth music professor Bill Cole. Cole responded by harassing Ingraham's dormitory roommate and inciting anger against her in one of his classes. Cole later sued Ingraham for $2.4 million; the college paid for his lawyer. He ceased the lawsuit in 1985.

She also authored a piece characterizing a campus gay rights group as "cheerleaders for latent campus Sodomites". Additionally, she is known for having secretly taped the meetings of the LGBT student group at the time, later publishing the transcript, and the names of the officers, in the Review. Jeffrey Hart, the faculty adviser for The Dartmouth Review described Ingraham as having "the most extreme antihomosexual views imaginable," and noted that "she went so far as to avoid a local eatery where she feared the waiters were homosexual." In 1997, Ingraham wrote an essay in the Washington Post in which she stated that she changed her views after witnessing "the dignity, fidelity and courage" with which her gay brother Curtis and his late companion coped with AIDS. Ingraham regrets the "callous rhetoric" of her youth, and now supports some legal protections for homosexuals.

In the late 1980s, Ingraham worked as a speechwriter in the Ronald Reagan administration for the Domestic Policy advisor. She also briefly served as editor of The Prospect, the magazine issued by Concerned Alumni of Princeton. After law school, in 1991, she served as a law clerk for Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York and subsequently clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She then worked as an attorney at the New York-based law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

In 1996, she and Jay P. Lefkowitz organized the first Dark Ages Weekend in response to the New Year's Renaissance Weekend of the Democrats.

Ingraham has had two stints as a cable television host. In the late 1990s, she became a CBS commentator and hosted the MSNBC program Watch It! Several years later, Ingraham began openly campaigning for another cable television show on her radio program. She finally got her wish in 2008, when Fox News Channel gave her a three-week trial run for a new show entitled Just In. She appeared in a leopard-print skirt on a 1995 cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection with an article about rising young conservatives.

Her latest book is titled Of Thee I Zing and was released on July 12, 2011.