Whitaker was senior vice president and Washington bureau chief for NBC News, succeeding Tim Russert after his fatal heart attack in June 2008.
In that role, he oversaw all Washington-based reporting and production for NBC and MSNBC during the 2008 election and early years of the Obama presidency, in addition to appearing as an on-air analyst.
[10] In 2011, Whitaker published a family memoir, My Long Trip Home, about his turbulent upbringing as the child of an interracial marriage between a pioneering but self-destructive black scholar of Africa and a white French immigrant whose father, Edouard Theis, was a clergyman who helped save the lives of Jews during World War II in the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
[13] While dealing with Cosby's history of infidelity and a paternity extortion trial, Whitaker's biography did not explore the assault claims that pre-dated his book.
[13][17] In 2018, Whitaker published Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance, about the legacy of the African-American community of Pittsburgh, where his father grew up and his grandparents owned funeral homes.
The book links stories of prominent artists who grew up in Pittsburgh—including musicians Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Roy Eldridge, Kenny Clarke, Ray Brown, Erroll Garner; artist Romare Bearden; and playwright August Wilson—influential journalists for the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier—including Robert Lee Vann, Wendell Smith and Evelyn Cunningham—and historic figures whose careers were shaped by their interaction with Pittsburgh—including Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.
[22][23] The book chronicled the sequence of events that changed the course of American racial and political history in that one pivotal year, including the rise of Stokely Carmichael to the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Carmichael's popularizing of the slogan "Black Power"; the founding of the Black Panther Party by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; the celebration of the first Kwanzaa by cultural nationalist Maulana Karenga; and the "White backlash" vote in the 1966 midterm elections that helped elect Ronald Reagan as Governor of California and set the stage for the presidential runs of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968.
[25] He also has an honorary degree from Wheaton College (Massachusetts), where he gave the commencement speech in 1999 and where his mother taught French literature for three decades.