Washington Post

WASHINGTON - Brooke Shearer, a former journalist and private investigator whose varied career also included assignments in government and nonprofit work and who rose to social prominence in Washington during the presidency of her friend Bill Clinton, died Tuesday at her home in the District of Columbia. She had cancer. She was 58.

Shearer was the daughter of author Lloyd Shearer, who wrote Parade magazine's "Walter Scott's Personality Parade" feature that answered readers questions about movie stars, politics and other current events. She was married to Strobe Talbott, a former Time magazine editor who served as the second-ranking official at the State Department in the Clinton White House and now heads the Brookings Institution research and policy center.

She and her husband's lives and careers were intertwined with future President Clinton's. Talbott and Clinton had roomed together as Rhodes scholars at Oxford University in the early 1970s, and Shearer became close with Clinton's wife, Hillary, now the secretary of state.

Shearer accompanied Hillary Clinton as a personal aide during the 1992 presidential campaign and, following the election, became director of the White House Fellows program, which allows promising applicants to gain Washington experience in the executive branch. In Clinton's second term as president, Shearer served in the Interior Department, helping developing countries establish national park systems.

In 2001, she and her husband moved to New Haven, Conn., where they worked at programs affiliated with Yale University. Shearer was founding director of the Yale World Fellows program, which aimed to bring young leaders from around the world to study at Yale for a semester or so. Shearer and her husband returned to Washington the next year when Talbott was appointed president of the Brookings Institution.

Subsequently, Shearer was on the board of the International Center for Research on Women, a nongovernmental organization focusing on women's health and empowerment, and was extensively involved in fundraising for the National Archives and groups supporting reconstruction work in Afghanistan and bringing HIV/AIDS education and medicine to women in developing countries.

Brooke Lloyd Shearer was born July 28, 1950, in Los Angeles, where her family's home was once described by The Washington Post as "a kind of salon for political types and West Los Angeles' tennis-playing intelligentsia."

In 1971, she graduated from Stanford University and married Talbott, who had been a friend of her older brother Derek's at Yale.