Walter Shapiro, Political Columnist With a Contrarian Streak, Dies at 77

Walter Shapiro, a canny, penetrating and often contrarian political columnist whose career included stints as a presidential speechwriter, stand-up comic, professor, author and, as a college student, congressional candidate, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 77.

The cause of his death, in a hospital, was an infection related to his recent treatment for cancer, his wife, the journalist and author Meryl Gordon, said.

Mr. Shapiro’s lifelong passion for politics was piqued in 1962, when he was a high school student in Norwalk, Conn., and his mother gave him a copy of “The Making of the President 1960” by Theodore H. White. The next year, at 16, he took his first airplane flight to attend President John F. Kennedy’s funeral.

He began his career in journalism at Congressional Quarterly and went on to write for Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, The New Republic and Esquire. He later wrote for Salon, Yahoo News, Politics Daily and Roll Call.

As a political columnist, Mr. Shapiro was known to pierce the cacophony of snarky commentary, predictive polls and bloviating politicians.

“He was able to convey what was simultaneously ridiculous, ennobling, squalid and necessary,” James Fallows, a former editor of The Atlantic, who started working at Washington Monthly with Mr. Shapiro in 1972, said in an interview.