Helene Cooper is the White House correspondent for the New York Times.  Prior to that assignment, she had been the diplomatic correspondent and an assistant editorial page editor for the New York Times and had spent twelve years as a reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal.  She was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and lives in the Washington, D.C., area.  She recently published a memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, which chronicles her youth and coming of age in 1980s Liberia during a period of political unrest.