David Wise was born in Manhattan, New York on May 10, 1930. While attending Columbia College, he worked as a campus stringer for The New York Herald Tribune. He joined the Herald Tribune's staff in 1951 and later moved to Washington, where he covered politics and the Kennedy White House. He was named Washington bureau chief in 1963 and served in that role until the paper closed in 1966. He wrote several books with Thomas B. Ross including The U-2 Affair and The Invisible Government. His other nonfiction books included The Seven Million Dollar Spy and The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power, which won a George Polk Award. He also wrote three spy novels including The… Children's Game. He contributed to numerous magazines including Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Republic, and Smithsonian. He was also an intelligence and national security commentator on CNN for six years. He died from pancreatic cancer on October 8, 2018 at the age of 88.