David Rogers has covered Congress for better than 30 years and was an early addition to POLITICO in January 2008.

Rogers broke into newspapers in New Jersey in the ’60s with the Perth Amboy Evening News, later The News Tribune in Woodbridge, N.J. Drafted and sent to Vietnam, he served as a combat infantry medic with the 1st Division in 1969. After coming home, he returned to reporting in New Jersey but then left in 1971 to go back to school in Massachusetts, where he signed with The Boston Globe two years later.

Rogers covered Boston’s neighborhoods, school desegregation and, ultimately, City Hall before the Globe sent him to Washington in late 1979. Congress has been his chief focus since. The Wall Street Journal picked him up in 1983, and he remained there for 24 years before being bought out in December 2007 with the Rupert Murdoch takeover.

Much of Rogers’s early education in Congress came from the Massachusetts delegation, which then included Speaker Tip O’Neill and senior members of the House Appropriations Committee, who encouraged him to cover that panel when few other reporters did on a regular basis. His Vietnam experience fed an interest as well in the covert wars of the 1980s, and his reporting disclosed the U.S. mining of Nicaraguan harbors as well as earned him a footnote — though not a movie part — in “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

Rogers is a graduate of Hamilton College (1968) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1973). He is married and the father of twin sons.