I went to Occidental College in an honors program where I could design an inter-disciplinary major and design many of my own classes.  As some of you know, my father was an aide to Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department, so understandably my major was a tangent of political science.  My freshman roommate was a computer science major.  (Remember, this was still in the punch card era.)  My first curated class was one in which we designed a program to compare speeches by Robert Kennedy and George Wallace for their racism index (and design the racism index…)

I joined Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968 as the youngest member of his National staff.  By May I was his personal assistant.  I was at the Ambassador Hotel, and attended all of the heartbreaking events in New York and Washington in the following days. 

I worked in one more political campaign, Tom Bradley’s first run for mayor of Los Angeles in 1969.  But in 1972, I left the country for London to work producing and editing audio documentaries for a company that had bought the entire NBC Television and Radio Archives on audiotape.  I had been its Program Manager in my first job out of college. The programs were distributed on audio cassette to schools, universities and libraries. 

I had a wonderful eight months in London, much of it spent traveling in Europe.  I had started dating Susan Kleinberg, who had just graduated from Pomona.  Our grandparents had known each other as young immigrants in Seattle, in fact, her grandparents knew both my father’s parents in Seattle, and my mother’s parents in Tacoma, long before my parents ever met.  Europe was not our first date, but close.  We’re still together. 

We’ve lived in New York City most of our adult lives.  She’s a visual artist, who has shown in seven Venice Biennales — no one knows Venice better — and we’ve had many amazing experiences there over the years...and in other shows she's had around the world. 

My first job in New York was with the New York City Ballet, recording and editing audio interviews with the principal dancers for their summer and winter tours.  What a job!

I got a graduate school education in television production when I was hired as a story editor on the eventual Peabody Award-winning PBS series “Visions,” which over four years produced 40 feature-length independent films and in-studio plays for television.  One of our films, “Alambrista,” won the Camera d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival.  One of our plays was written by Maya Angelou.  

That said, the series was not renewed by PBS, which was a few years into its conservative retrenchment.  Looking for a job, I went to see Tom Brokaw, who I had met during the Kennedy campaign when he was an anchor at KNBC in Los Angeles.  I was hired as the writer in the political unit for the 1980 election.  David Brinkley was still there and it was great!  One of my researchers was Jill Abramson, who would go on to be managing editor of the New York Times. 

After the election, I was hired full-time as manager of the unit. (One of my researchers in 1984 was Arnon Mishkin, who would go on to be head of the Fox News Decision Desk in both 2012 and 2020, when his now-legendary early state calls for Obama and Biden infuriated Republicans, but proved to be spot on.)  Both Jill and Arnon remain good friends.

I went to work for Tom as a writer and producer at Nightly News in 1985.  (In the recent NETFLIX documentary on the Challenger space shuttle explosion, you can see me sitting behind Tom on camera during all the tense hours of NBC’s special coverage.)

In 1988, I became the Senior News Producer of the ill-fated “USA TODAY” television news program.  It was a blast.  Just at the dawn of digital production and editing, we had all of the cutting-edge technology -- equipment that had not yet even come to the network news divisions -- and an unlimited budget!  But the executive producer, who had been the head of the Today Show, chose uniquely weak anchors for two of the four USA TODAY sections, and refused to hire a young reporter from Dallas I wanted to bring on -- Scott Pelley (the now CBS News and "60 Minutes" anchor). However, the short-lived series brought me back to Washington for a year, after a 20-year absence; and again, I got invaluable experience, this time producing a national series. 

I’ve had, and am still having, a highly stimulating life in television and film production.  I created and produced the DISCOVER MAGAZINE series at the Walt Disney Company, and then the “Outside Television Presents” series with Outside magazine, where we had national Emmy nominations for Outstanding Documentary and Outstanding Cinematography, along with many film festival awards.

At Outside Television, I directed six documentaries among the 30+ we produced.  Now my number is up to 13.  

Circling back for a moment, my favorite is “The Hudson Riverkeepers” with Bobby Kennedy Jr.  Among other lovely scenes is footage of his father and Walter Cronkite on the banks of the Hudson in 1966, talking about how grossly polluted the Hudson was then and what Sen. Kennedy was planning to do about it.  I had known Bobby Jr. since junior high school.  Sadly, his careen into the COVID anti-vax movement has squandered his great environmental work, and of course the two films we made together, which ten years ago I edited into one feature doc, “The  Waterkeepers.”  No one watches them anymore on Amazon Video.

But my latest documentary and its accompanying YouTube video series have been the most engaging and sublime experiences of my life.  In 2015, I was invited by Caltech and the LIGO Laboratory to make the definitive film about LIGO’s expected discovery of gravitational waves — from the collision of two black holes or neutron stars.  The discovery was not expected for a year or more, they were just launching a $200 million upgrade to their two observatories.  But on our second shoot I was at their observatory near Baton Rouge, LA with my crew when the historic discovery was made - this after a 50-year search.  Our final shoot, two years later, was an icy, magical week in Stockholm, when our three main characters, the creators of the $1 billion LIGO project, won an almost instant Nobel Prize in Physics.  It was a two-year thrill, as you can see in the film, “LIGO,” and the online series.  A second film, on the hugely impressive women physicists and engineers of LIGO, is in the works.  

Jonathan Hadary (born October 11, 1948) is an American actor.

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, Hadary arrived at Tufts University already an accomplished actor. He was cast in many shows at Tufts, both student and faculty directed. During his sophomore year, he became an understudy for the Boston company of You're a Good Man Charlie Brown. This being the Vietnam era, the actor playing Charlie Brown was drafted. The actor playing Schroeder was moved to the Charlie Brown role, and Hadary took the part of Schroeder. He finished the Boston run of the show and the toured with it for some time.

Hadary made his New York City stage debut in the 1976 Playwrights Horizons staging of Albert Innaurato's Gemini. Critical acclaim for the off-Broadway production resulted in it transferring to PAF Playhouse and then to Circle Repertory Company, and finally to Broadway, where it ran for 1819 performances. Hadary worked off-Broadway again on the 1979 Howard Ashman and Alan Menken musical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Ted Tally's 1980 play Coming Attractions, and the 1981 Tom Lehrer revue Tom Foolery. The following year he returned to Broadway to replace Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy.

A member of the acting company at Circle Repertory Company, Hadary won an Obie Award for his performance in the 1985 William M. Hoffman play As Is at Circle Rep, and again, the play moved to Broadway, where it was nominated for three Tony Awards and won the Drama Desk Award for Best Play. In 1989, he co-starred opposite Tyne Daly in Gypsy, which earned him Tony Award and Drama Desk Award nominations.

Hadary played the role of Roy Cohn in the national touring production of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's theatrical epic Angels in America in 1994-95. He also appeared in the 2006 revival of Awake and Sing!, for which he shared the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance. He most recently portrayed King Arthur in the Broadway production of Monty Python's Spamalot.

Hadary's feature film credits include A Time to Kill, Private Parts, and Intolerable Cruelty. On television he has appeared in Miami Vice, Party of Five, Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Hope and Faith, Sex and the City and The Heart, She Holler.

Graduated from WJ by the skin of my teeth.  There followed MJC, U of Md, US Navy (Commissaryman 2nd Class), Library School, and a Master of Arts degree in American Literature (GWU).  Worked in public libraries for a couple of years before joining the Library of Congress.  Thirty six year career managing librarians and IT staff; leading projects/programs in digital preservation, large scale digital storage systems, telecommunications operations, book repository provisioning, overseas collecting, and so on.  Retired as Deputy Associate Librarian for Library Services.  It was an incredible experience, especially for someone with such modest credentials through high school.  In my mid-twenties married an Ursaline Academy girl (Dianne) and raised two sons in NW DC.  Coached the boys on several teams in the Cap City Little League, routinely losing to Mike Domanski’s damned Yankees.  Now fill my days as an amateur stone mason in Rappahannock County, Virginia.