Karen Tumulty (born December 1, 1955) is a political columnist for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post, Tumulty wrote for Time from October 1994 to April 2010. She was a Congressional Correspondent, as well as the National Political Correspondent based in Washington D.C. for the magazine. Life Tumulty graduated from David Crockett High School in Austin, Texas in May 1973. She later graduated in 1977 from the University of Texas at Austin with a BA in Journalism with high honors; she is an alumna of the Alpha Xi Delta sorority. She wrote for The Daily Texan student newspaper. She received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981. Tumulty is married to Paul Richter and has two sons, Nicholas and Jack. She is Catholic. Career Tumulty began her career in 1977 at the now-defunct San Antonio Light. Tumulty spent 14 years with the Los Angeles Times, covering the US Congress, economics, business, energy, and general-assignment beats. While at the Times, she won the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism in 1982 for Large Newspapers, and the National Press Foundation's Edwin Hood Award for diplomatic correspondence in 1993. Tumulty joined Time in 1994. She covered Congress for two years, during which time she reported and wrote the magazine's 1995 "Man of the Year" profile of Newt Gingrich. In 1996, she became a White House Correspondent, writing major stories on President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. She became the National Political Correspondent in 2001. In 1997, then-Vice-President Al Gore was having a late-night conversation with Tumulty and New York Times reporter Rick Berke aboard Air Force Two when he casually mentioned that he has either read or was told that he and his wife Tipper's early pre-marital relationship in Boston while Gore was at Harvard was the basis for the protagonists of the book and movie Love Story by Erich Segal, Oliver & Jenny Barrett. Berke later stated that Gore didn't offer it as a fact and that it was just second-hand info from a Nashville Tennessean article or reporter who had interviewed Segal, so Berke decided not to mention it in his article since it was not offered as a fact by Gore. However, Tumulty included the story in her own article and presented it as though Gore claimed it as fact, which claim was picked up by numerous publications afterward as being another example of Gore