In 1970 Maclean was assigned to the Washington Bureau of the "Tribune." As diplomatic correspondent there he covered the State Department and was a regular on the "Kissinger Shuttle," covering much of the "shuttle diplomacy" of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Maclean was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University for the 1974-1975 academic year and became the "Tribune"’s Foreign Editor in Chicago in 1988. He resigned from the newspaper in 1995 (after news reports of Colorado's tragic South Canyon Fire) to write "Fire on the Mountain" and has since published three other books on fatal wildland fires.