worked on newspapers in California, Texas (including the Texas Observer, "radical" by Texas standards), and Florida before joining The Nation's staff in Washington. For several years he was banned from the White House as a "security risk." When the American Civil Liberties Union took on that legal challenge and won, killing the ban, Sherrill wouldn't go back to covering the White House, considering it Washington's least useful source of real news.

Sherrill has written hundreds of articles and book reviews for various publications. For a few years he was a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and an occasional contributor to Playboy and Penthouse.

His other books are The Accidental President (about Lyndon Johnson), The Last Kennedy (about Teddy), Gothic Politics in the Deep South (about such fine chaps as Jim Eastland and Strom Thurmond), The Drugstore Liberal (about Hubert Humphrey), The Saturday Night Special (about guns), Military Justice Is to Justice As Military Music Is to Music (about GI protests in the Vietnam War), and two college textbooks, Why They Call It Politics, and Governing America.