Jodie T. Allen, a journalist who drew on her years of experience as a federal policy analyst while distilling arcane data into accessible, persuasive prose, including as editor of The Washington Post’s Outlook commentary section, died Sept. 15 at her home in Washington. She was 88.
The cause was complications from lung cancer, said her son, Theodore Allen.
An economist by training, Ms. Allen began her career in the late 1950s, in an era when Beltway think tanks and the government’s policy-research bureaucracy were overwhelmingly male domains — and when prominent female economists “were almost as scarce as generals in skirts,” as Time magazine later put it.
She spent two decades working for public and private think tanks such as the Urban Institute, developing early computer models and specializing in the impact of political and demographic trends on tax programs. In the Carter administration, she served in the Labor Department as deputy assistant secretary for policy and research.
On the side, Ms. Allen penned occasional op-eds for The Post, analyzing proposed reforms to Social Security and welfare programs. Her pieces impressed editorial page editor Meg Greenfield, who hired Ms. Allen in 1980 as an editorial writer.
Ms. Allen briefly left The Post in 1985 to help then-Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca write a syndicated column. She returned to serve as deputy editor of the Outlook pages, which ran in the paper’s Sunday edition for nearly 70 years. In 1990, she became editor of the section, assigning and shaping reported essays and analysis pieces while continuing to contribute as a writer.
In lean, uncomplicated prose, Ms. Allen wrote about trade and budget deficits, monetary policy, environmental spending, and social reforms, among other weighty topics that she made digestible, even delicious. As an editor, she commissioned and polished Outlook pieces not only by eminent experts but by “the cop on the beat, the school teacher in his classroom, the priest in his parish, the guy working the night shift,” she recalled in 1996, when she left The Post to join the online magazine Slate.
“Although Jodie seemed to know every last Washington wile, she never grew cynical about the power of policy to increase social fairness,” said writer Katherine Boo, who worked with Ms. Allen in Outlook and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for nonfiction.
“And for all her statistical finesse,” Boo added in an email, “she retained a sharp eye for what the numbers left out.”
When Slate launched in 1996, at the dawn of the digital age, Ms. Allen entered the vanguard of online journalism as the magazine’s Washington editor. “Her willingness to take this leap — she was already in her late 50s — reflected her wonderful quality of derring-do,” recalled journalist David Plotz, her deputy at the time.
Ms. Allen left Slate three years later, jumping to U.S. News & World Report, where she worked as a columnist and business editor. She was the publication’s managing editor before moving to the Pew Research Center, where she worked as a senior editor from 2005 until her retirement in 2011.
Apart from her intellectual curiosity, friends said, Ms. Allen had a sense of whimsy and a keen appreciation for the absurd, especially in government.
In a 1996 article in Slate, for example, she mused about a volleyball net that had suddenly gone up on a beach near her vacation cottage in Maine, with little or no regulatory interference from local officials. “Sure, it sags a bit by Olympic standards, but it stands, nevertheless, as a symbol of what the human spirit can achieve when free from the oppression of Big Government,” she wrote sarcastically, poking fun at the conservatism of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his allies.
“I don’t doubt for a moment that if you put a group of bureaucrats around a conference table, the chances of them coming up with sensible rules for beach volleyball … are zilch,” she added. “More likely they would invent a bunch of rules for keeping the players from spraining their ankles or getting their toes cut by pieces of glass hidden in the sand or contracting tetanus from rusty nails stuck in driftwood. Actually, you know, there are rules sort of like that.”
Born Sept. 1, 1938, in Manhattan, Josephine Edith Tetreault was raised on the Upper East Side. Her father practiced law while her mother, who was also a law school graduate, worked as a secretary, the best job she could get in the Depression, Theodore Allen said.
Ms. Allen studied economics and political science at Vassar College, where she was elected Phi Beta Kappa and received a bachelor’s degree in 1959. The next year, she married George V. Allen Jr., an environmental lawyer.
Her husband died in 2014. In addition to her son, survivors include a sister and two grandsons.
Owing partly to her experiences dealing with condescending male colleagues in her early years, friends said, Ms. Allen brought a finely tuned sarcastic wit and irreverence to The Post that made her a classic newsroom character.
She had a “mischievous, naughty, caustic sense of humor,” said foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius, who preceded Ms. Allen as Outlook editor. He fondly described her as “The Washington Post’s Dorothy Parker — you know, if you don’t have something nice to say about someone, you’ve come to the right place.”
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