Karl Zinsmeister  Walter Karl Zinsmeister is an American journalist and researcher. From 2006 to 2009, he served in the White House as President George W. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. He is currently an executive at The Philanthropy Roundtable, and a leading national authority on philanthropy and the power of private giving and voluntary action to solve public problems. Zinsmeister is a graduate of Yale University where he studied history and was a member of Manuscript Society. He also spent time as a special student at Trinity College, Dublin, in Ireland. He won college rowing championships in both the U.S. and Ireland. His first job in Washington was as a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat. He was later named DeWitt Wallace Fellow, and eventually appointed to the J.B. Fuqua Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where over three decades he researched a range of topics extending from social welfare and demographics to economics and cultural trends. Zinsmeister's writing has been published in periodicals ranging from "The Atlantic Monthly" to "Real Clear Politics" and the "New York Times" to the "Wall Street Journal". He has been an adviser to many research and policy groups, and has testified before Congress and Presidential commissions on topics like family policy, daycare, farm subsidies, and the Iraq war. He has made many appearances on television and radio. He has written 13 books, including one released simultaneous with the 2016 elections on the best ways to solve future social problems, a 2015 volume on how public policy is changed by savvy donors, and a 2014 look at charter school effectiveness (with a spinoff in the "Wall Street Journal"). He wrote two books of Iraq War reporting, and other works on education, economics, and population trends. He also created a storytelling cookbook, and a non-fiction comic book. In late 2015 he edited a book and published a companion essay in the "Wall Street Journal" predicting a revival of Catholic schools. In 2016, a major new reference book created by Zinsmeister, the "Almanac of American Philanthropy", was published after three years of in-depth research. The book has been described as the authoritative reference on private giving in the U.S. It contains sections on America's greatest givers, living and dead; the major achievements of American philanthropy in nine areas (including Medicine, Education, the Arts, Religion, Overseas giving, Local projects, and so forth); an annotated list of essential readings in the field; a collection of leading quotes on philanthropy; a 22-page foldout timeline mapping important philanthropic events in the U.S. from 1636 to 3015.