About Michael Phillips
Michael Phillips is a staff reporter in the Washington, D.C., bureau of The Wall Street Journal. He writes on international economics, Third World development, foreign assistance and AIDS for the paper. He rode with a front-line Marine infantry squad from Kuwait to Baghdad during the 2003 invasion and has returned to cover the same battalion on four other occasions since then. In 2001, he covered U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.
He is the author of a book, The Gift of Valor (Broadway Books, 2005), about Corporal Jason Dunham, the first Marine to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War.
Mr. Phillips travels frequently to Africa for the paper to write about, among other issues, how Africans reconcile tradition and modernity in the age of AIDS.
Mr. Phillips joined Dow Jones in January 1995 as a reporter for the Dow Jones Emerging Markets Report newswire, based in Washington, D.C. He became a reporter in the Journal’s Washington news bureau in June 1996.
In the fall of 1986, Mr. Phillips began his journalism career as a free-lance reporter for the New York Times’ New Jersey section in the Sunday edition. For several months in late 1987 he was a reporter for United Press International in Boston, before becoming a free-lance reporter in Dakar, Senegal, in 1988. He joined States News Service during the fall of 1988 as a reporter, and from Washington, D.C., he covered regional news first for New Jersey and later for Minnesota and Florida. In 1991 he became a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Madrid and was dispatched to cover conflicts in Somalia and Angola.
In 2002, Mr. Phillips was a finalist in the American Society of Newspaper Editors Awards in the short, distinguished writing category for articles from Afghanistan.
Born in Minneapolis, Minn., Mr. Phillips received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a master’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University. While at Princeton, he was a reporting intern for UPI in Nairobi, Kenya.