Unleashed Books: Nicholas D Kristof is "Chasing Hope"

The new memoir from New York Times columnist is a tour de force of turmoil and tragedy, with uplifting moments from his travels through 150 countries. Hear from him directly here.

On May 14, Nicholas Kristof's memoir, Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life, was published by his regular publisher, Knopf. That same day, Kristof was awarded the Peter Kihss Award of The Silurians Press Club for his mentoring of young journalists and his contributions toward the next generation of writers of commentary and international affairs. Then, at a luncheon in the National Arts Club, he sat for a 'conversation' with David A. Andelman and questions from his audience…..

The book is a record of hope, as Kristof suggests, for why else would any reporter rush toward gunfire, visit wars and revolutions: "Hope is a better strategy to follow evidence and achieve better outcomes that are possible if you work at it."

DAVID A. ANDELMAN:   I certainly don't need to introduce you, Nick, since everyone especially in this room who doesn't know you must have been living under a rock for some time where in fact they might have come upon you sheltering from some war, revolution, or human catastrophe.

But before we get into your origin story and the start of your remarkable memoir, I'd like to jump to the end in a way. I'm an historian by education, so I’m reluctant to engage in what-ifs, but I'd be interested in your discussing a bit the divergence, perhaps increasingly these days, between commentary and reportage. In the course of your remarkable career, you've championed any number of causes, changed so many millions of lives on multiple continents, but what if The New York Times had anointed you not as a columnist but simply allowed you to roam wherever you'd like as a correspondent. What might you have done differently, and what might you advise today's reporters to do in circumstances like that.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Thanks, David. In terms of this question of reporting versus opinion, I'm in the sort of strange position of being this opinion columnist who's kind of skeptical of opinion journalism, and I really do think that the most important thing that journalists do—including we opinion people—is the reporting part of it. That's not stirring the pot but it's adding to the pot, and I do think when that is done, then opinion journalism can be really useful because we can not only present new information, but we can do it in a way that provides a context—thoughtful ideas. The tendency often has been—you see it particularly in cable TV—shouting one's own view and not really adding new perspective.

It's about preaching to one's base and I do not find that terribly useful frankly. I think my most important opinion columns have basically been about the reporting.

So, when I was writing about the Darfur genocide, the opinion was pretty boring. The opinion was genocide is a bad thing and that's not a very interesting idea, but I think what made those columns work—and likewise the sex trafficking columns and others—was really the reporting. So, I think if I had not gotten the column, I think I would have ended up doing fairly similar things if I had the freedom to do it. And I probably would have been reined in by editors saying like, "Oh, you're skating pretty close to what those opinion people do.” But I do fundamentally believe that what is important about journalism is the reporting part.

ANDELMAN:  So let's bring it up to the present day. What if today you were to label what's going on in Gaza genocide which in many respects it probably is. How would that work? Would you feel comfortable saying something like that today given the charged atmosphere we’re seeing on college campuses and the political scene?

KRISTOF:  Even in my column where I do have license to report on opinions, I have not used the word genocide. I've been very critical of Israeli conduct in Gaza and critical of the Biden administration's unconditional transfer of weapons to be used in Gaza. But to me, at least the choice of the word genocide is not particularly helpful. And again, I think it's the reporting about the number of 2,000 pound bombs being transferred and the impact of those bombs and what happens in neighborhoods.

Talking to people in Gaza anyway one can, through WhatsApp or whatever, and trying to convey what is happening there—that is more important. I do have to say that I'm a little bit conflicted on these issues. And I had to wrestle with this a little bit in writing the book because I've always believed that reporting should have a moral purpose. You know, one reason I went into journalism was in the aftermath of Watergate—that journalism does serve a real purpose, and I felt that when I was covering Tian'anmen in China and I saw a modern army mow people down. I wanted to fight back at massacres with my keyboard. But yet, I think that there's a danger of taking that too far. And I think some journalists today do try to take that too far and want every piece that is written to slam down a moral argument. It's not a binary question, but there is a spectrum and where exactly on that spectrum we put ourselves is going to be different whether we're in opinion or whether we're on the news side. But I think it is possible to serve as a journalist, to feel that you are serving a cause larger than yourself and some kind of public purpose without using the word genocide at every turn and without going over the top.

ANDELMAN:   When [New York Times executive editor] Joe Khan was here last month sitting in that very chair, he blamed the journalism schools for fostering that kind of an atmosphere. So for instance, if we see a half a million people die of famine in Gaza, does that then become genocide or what should journalism schools be teaching people in reporting on something like that?

KRISTOF:  My take is that it's not exactly the journalism schools as such but that there is a real generational gap within journalism. And a lot of it is because newsrooms now have a lot of people who are not traditional journalists. They're not reporters or photographers, but they are working on your search engine optimization. They're working on coding. They're doing audio and video and a thousand other things and doing incredibly important work, but they do not necessarily emerge from covering city council meetings and having to face city council members the next day. Again, I think it's important for journalists, whether they're covering a city council or a presidential race to convey the truth as they understand it. But it has to be done without having a cudgel whether you're covering the city council or the White House. And pulling that off I think is hard. So, I don't think it's so much the journalism schools as such, I think it's partly the range of people who now work in news rooms. Like me, they deeply believe in having a moral purpose in journalism. But from my point of view, they want to take it too far. I mean like they don't want to run a Tom Cotton, op-ed for example, because they think it's wrong, dangerous, unhelpful. I believe op-ed pages should have a broad range.

ANDELMAN:  So let's step back and see how you got here. What made you become a journalist and not say a lawyer. You got through your Rhodes scholarship in law at Magdalen College, Oxford. You were all set. You could have gone into a white shoe law firm, you could have made a ton of money and also done good things along the way perhaps. What made you choose journalism rather than law or something else?

KRISTOF:  I think probably the same reasons that a lot of us here became journalists. I mean it really is pretty incredible that we managed to figure out how to get paid for interviewing interesting people and go interesting places and don't tell my editors that but I think it is just an amazing profession. Somebody the other day was describing my book as a love letter to journalism, and I just think it's incredible what one has been able to do. And there was also that element of moral purpose. I don't think I would have felt terribly fulfilled as a corporate lawyer. I did see with Watergate the power of journalism. When I was studying law, I happened to make a trip through the Middle East.

I was paying my travel by  freelancing articles, and I went to Hama in Syria in 1982. Hama was a brutal massacre in which nobody really knows but maybe 20,00 people were killed. You see a government slaughter people and you think how does one address that? Maybe some people respond to that by becoming an aid worker. My view is one  can address that by raising the cost to government of massacring people or committing genocide, and one way of doing that is again with our laptops or with our cameras.

ANDELMAN:  Our mutual friend John Kifner once told me he'd stopped his car on the fringe of a rice paddy in central Java at dawn and was watching the sun rise over it, and he got out of his car and he said, "I'm not going to tell anybody in New York, but they're paying me to do this." So, you're absolutely right. I have a sense it was Tian'anmen Square that really changed you in many respects. Joe Khan, in fact confessed he too was very much changed by China. How did that experience change you beyond being able of course to work with your wife on a major story?

KRISTOF:  It taught me a lot of things. One, it was impossible during the Tian'anmen student democracy movement not to just have your heart be moved by kids who were risking their careers and risking their lives to try to achieve a more democratic government. I think that also created problems in our journalism and that we thought that the underdog might actually win. We believed a little bit too much the rhetoric about the power of the people. It turns out that when principles encounter machine guns, typically the machine guns will triumph, at least in the short run. I think also one of the things I learned was that my sources in the Chinese government were disproportionally among the reformers. And so I didn't appreciate how many hardliners there were who were absolutely ready to massacre protesters.

Kristof and wife, Sheryl WuDunn, at Tian'anmen in 1989 … the two shared the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting

Then after the massacre, I was on Tian'anmen Square, so I knew what had happened, I had an idea about how many people had been killed. And then there were all kinds of rumors going around in Beijing that made their way into a lot of papers that were wild exaggerations—tens of thousands of people had been killed, that Tian'anmen Square was knee deep in blood—this kind of thing. One of the things I learned from that is that victims lie too, and that inevitably we tend to find victims credible and distrust perpetrators of massacres. But we also have to be skeptical of victims. That was one of the lessons I absorbed.

It affected me in another way. I think much of my career has been about skating along the edge of what is appropriate for a journalist. It's a little easier as a columnist. But I think that began in China after watching the government massacre people. One thing that I did which I wrote about as you know, there was a student who helped us cover Tian'anmen—a 19-year-old kid named Liu Xiang. He got in trouble for helping us. He ended up in prison, he escaped from prison, then he came to Beijing and secretly asked for help in fleeing the country.

One pretty basic rule of journalism, of course, is that you don't help escaped felons flee the country. And on the other hand, here's a 19-year-old kid who if we didn't help him was at some point going to get caught, terrible things would have happened to him, and my wife and I just agonized over our responsibilities to The Times.

ANDELMAN:  OK, so don't tell them what happed….Make them read the book to find out!   [laughter]

KRISTOF:  To be continued in the book!

ANDELMAN:  Let me just run down some of the comments in your book. One was:  "American Liberals are rightly skeptical of military interventions." Why does it just have to be American liberals? And why isn't the GOP just being a trifle hypocritical by its determinedly pro-Israel stands? For instance. Why does it have to be liberals?

KRISTOF:  Just because it's traditionally been liberals who have been skeptical of military interventions and conservatives, you know more sympathetic. I was thinking of Iraq, Afghanistan, etcetera.

ANDELMAN:  But should that not be a feeling shared across the political spectrum?

KRISTOF: Oh, absolutely. The context here is that we should be skeptical of military interventions, but think about it on kind of an ad hoc basis. There are some interventions that worked really well. I think we should have intervened in Rwanda in 1994, for example.

 I think intervening in Kosovo was absolutely the right thing to do.

Britain's intervention in Sierra Leone turned the course. Meanwhile, Iraq was a huge catastrophe. Basically what I was trying to convey is it's complicated and beware of broad ideological pronouncements.

ANDELMAN:  So, here's another one: "you never fully recover from watching any army turn weapons of war on its own people." Isn't that just what Donald Trump has threatened innumerable times to do even on the American people.

KRISTOF:   Slightly more subtly than what happened at Tian'anmen or elsewhere. But only slightly.

ANDELMAN:  Right, so how would you react to something like that as a columnist?

KRISTOF:  It's a lot easier for a columnist. As columnist, we do have the freedom to call out Trump when he talks about things like that.

ANDELMAN:  How should New York Times journalists react?

KRISTOF:  The journalists' problem, I think, is more complicated. In 2016, we erred because we followed a traditional approach. Put it this way: I think that in journalism we try to promote fairness and also truth. And often when you are fair and quote people on each side and let readers sort it out, often that advances truth. Sometimes that does not, and I think of the Joe McCarthy period where it just did not work to quote Joe McCarthy and some guy who was accusing him of being a communist the public didn't understand. The civil rights movement the same. I think Vietnam there is something likewise, it did not work. Donald Trump in 2016 likewise, it just did not work to quote Trump at one level and then Hillary Clinton on the other. I think the public didn't get what every reporter covering the presidential race did, which was that Hillary Clinton was sort of a typical presidential candidate in terms of deceptiveness, if you will. Trump was off the charts. He was like nobody else, and I don't think we conveyed that adequately to readers. I think when we see that the truth is not getting through, we need to be more blunt, do more reporting. That will to some degree sacrifice trust for news organizations from the right, but truth is our paramount responsibility.

ANDELMAN:  "Civilization can unravel with frightening speed."  Is this what we're catapulting toward in America today?

KRISTOF:  I worry about that, and one thing that I think a bunch of people in this room have seen is how you get a society that is kind of working and then for whatever reason—ethnic tensions, sometimes it's a political leader, then it just comes apart and you get acts of violence that are horrific. Thomas Hobbes' writings became much more real to me when I covered some of these societies—Indonesia, Myanmar, and others that just unraveled and people turned on each other.

I do worry about that in the context of the US. There's a lot of talk about how the US may become less democratic, and I think that is one element of it. But another thing I worry about is political, and we are so polarized that you can easily imagine some active political violence, some assassination of some right-wing or left-wing figure being done, and then a jury having 1 or 2 members who will just refused to convict, creating a sense of impunity in ways that incentivize more acts of violence like that. And that's one thing I worry a lot about.

ANDELMAN:  Before we go to our members, one last question. "Pessimism," you write, "is as bad for your cardiovascular health as smoking 2 or 3 packs of cigarettes a day." It seems though a lot of the time you are a pessimist. How is your health now?  [laughter]

KRISTOF:  I don't think of myself as a pessimist at all.  I've seen a few too many massacres to be an optimist exactly. When people first meet me, they sort of expect this gloomy guy who's going to corner them and wag his finger and tell them about genocide of the Rohingya or female genital mutilation or whatever it may be. The truth is that I think the antidote is twofold: one, that over my career I really have seen this backdrop of moral and material progress. When I was a kid, a majority of human beings had always been illiterate. Now, we're pushing 90% adult literacy. That's transformative. When I was born, 20% of kids died before the age of 5. Now, we're down to 3.7%. This year, we'll set a new record low in the 300,000 year history of humanity for the risk of a kid dying by the age of 5. Those are really important gains. And so part of it is that trajectory.

And the other is just that when you are out covering crises, then you may write about the warlord who is killing people, raping people, torturing people. But side by side with the worst of humanity you just invariably find the best, and we are not tested in this country to the same degree because these things aren't happening right now. But when you are in eastern Congo or Darfur, it turns out that when we are tested we are capable of just amazing courage and decency and strength. So, I manage to come back sometimes from eastern Congo feeling a little bit better about humanity, despite all the terrible things that are going on because when we are tested people manage to come through sometimes.

VIDEO: The question period

ANDELMAN:  And you do get back, which is quite a miracle sometimes as we see quite dramatically in this book. Okay, we have our first question over there.

QUESTON:  Jerry Eskenazi…..Nick, did you find that the rise of social media and cable has affected the way columnists such as yourself work today. Do you have much more to explain, and are there problems inherent in that?

KRISTOF:  I have very ambivalent feelings about social media. On the one hand, I think one of the risks is that journalists have kind of figured out that there is an advantage to building their own brand. There's a commercial benefit. You can give speeches, you can parlay that into television gigs, you can write books, and basically if you want to have a brand, then it's important to be predictable and to cater to a particular ideological niche—not always obviously, but often. I think social media very much encourages that kind of process of pushing journalists,  especially opinion people, into particular ideological niches in ways that just leave us reinforcing people's prejudices rather than making them question themselves.

I think there's no doubt also that social media nurtures an undercurrent of extremism and polarization that is unhealthy for democracy. On the other hand, it has created some real accountability in checks and balances. There's a lot of meanness and unfairness and just idiocy on social media. But Black Twitter actually was fairly useful in bringing new voices to the fore that weren't getting attention and new issues to the fore. And internationally, like when reporters couldn't get into Syria or Iran. The fact that people in Iran were able to use social media to document the government arresting, imprisoning, killing people was a really important part of the picture that we were not able to cover adequately. Half the time I roll my eyes and think I'm never going to get on Twitter again and then often I actually drift back and look at it, but don't tell anybody.

ANDELMAN:  And some of us can't because Elon Musk banned them from it. Who's next?

QUESTION Leslie Wayne:  You ran for office—for governor of Oregon. Can you talk to us a little bit about that. Because it seems as though if you were going to become the governor, it's a whole different job. It's an administrative job. It seems like it would be a nightmare to be perfectly honest. So what was going through your mind to make that decision.

KRISTOF: It may have been a certain amount of delusional thinking there. But my previous book had been about the crisis in my own hometown in rural Oregon. This is an area that was dependent on agriculture, timber, and light manufacturing. Those jobs went away, meth arrived, and at this point more than a third of the kids on my old school bus have died from drugs, alcohol, or suicide. It's just been catastrophic to see what has happened. I was also just really frustrated by what was happening in Oregon, full of these great liberal values. But there's an incredible gulf between our values and our outcomes on homelessness, on crime, on education. So, there was a weak field, and that was why some people had reached out to me at the time. I also thought that if a reformist governor were elected that person would actually have something of a mandate to really bring about changes. So, I made that leap. Part of the calculation was dealing with things that I didn't know—like I didn't know the county commissioners and legislators around the state. I knew nothing about state finance and campaign finance. There were all kinds of missing areas that I should have known. But what I kept hearing from people was what was most necessary was somebody to advance a vision for the state and then bring people along toward that vision. There was a kind of a communications need as much as an administrative one for the state. That was an argument that I found somewhat persuasive.

It was sort of funny that when I did run, my team and I thought well, okay, I may not know campaign finance or whatever. But the one thing Kristoff will be able to do really well is meet the press and engage with  reporters, and it turned out to be the one thing I was really disastrous at. You know what the problem was? I answered people's questions. [laughter] And my team was like aghast.

QUESTION Linda Amster:  I am fascinated by your mentoring of so many journalists in your travels around the world. I wonder if you could take a moment to go into that a bit—how you do it.

KRISTOF:  Linda herself of course has mentored. When she was running the clerk program at The New York Times, those clerks have now peopled journalism at The Times and around the field. So, you provided a model for that. I've benefited very much from the mentoring of other editors and writers when I was a young reporter, and so tried to explore how I could further that. The two ways that I found it possible to do that to some degree were hiring really good assistants as a columnist and then really encouraging them and supporting them as they began to write. James Reston was really the pioneer of that in the Washington bureau. I was just kind of copying his model. And the other was when I was writing about Darfur, it was just so frustrating and hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered, and it felt like my columns were just disappearing without a ripple. So, I was trying everything I could try to engage people. That's really when I began leaping into video and social media, and a whole bunch of approaches. But one was, I decided, maybe I can have this contest to take a student with me on a reporting trip to Darfur. There'll be a competition which will arouse interest, and then the student will write about Darfur, and other students will be interested. I proposed this internally at The New York Times and it went to the legal department, and the legal department said, "Oh so you want to take a student into a war zone?"

So, I then revised the plan to take a a student with me to the developing world. And on that first trip, we kind of encircled Darfur without quite going into it. We did manage to get held up at gunpoint twice in the course of that first trip. But it's a reminder of just how many incredibly talented young people there are who study journalism who want to be journalists, even though the business model for what we do is quite uncertain. It has been just a privilege every year to take a student on a trip abroad and guide them to war, you know to cover issues, and they bring something important to the table. I mean they can relate to young people often in a way that I can't understand. They have concerns, viewpoints, perspectives that I might not. So, I think it has been good for The Times. I think it's been great for them. They've done amazing things. It's now been 18 years since I started it. It's been a wonderful process to do that.

QUESTION:  I've just returned from Oregon myself. I've got relatives who live there. Willamette County, Tilma County. The New York Times is so far from their reference. When I talked about stories around The Times it was like I was talking to something in another century to them. I can see your journalism, you traveled around the world, but you're working for one of the most elite media organizations in our time. Does that frustrate you? Is that what drove you to get into the political sphere in Oregon? Because not only are they thousands of miles away from us, but the people that you grew up with who had these tragic lives were not touched by government or social programs. How is as a journalist did you approach this? And how do you see yourself now in wrestling that paradox?

ANDELMAN:  Well, also is your column published in local newspapers in other parts of the country or the world for that matter?

KRISTOF:  So my column used to be published in The Oregonian, but now of course with budget cutting they don't take The New York Times News Service anymore. The Oregonian was once a great paper. It's now a shadow of itself. I think that one benefit of now being out in the wilds of Oregon, in a really conservative rural part, is that my neighbors—about 2/3 of them—voted for Donald Trump. Many people I deeply cared about would tell me that Covid vaccines were dangerous or that this was all a plot by Bill Gates to make them sterile or make money somehow. One of my best friends there packs a gun on his hip, more or less 24/7 as far as I can figure out. But these people are not caricatures. These are people I know, have known forever, care about. I got a text this morning from an old friend who started using drugs when he was 12. He's been in and out of problems before that. A year ago, he was selling fentanyl out of the back of his car and using it. These people, my friends, exasperate me. I often exasperate them. But we're friends, and I have to figure out how to talk to them.

The Kristofs with friend & customer of Kristof Farms

I have to understand what might move them and that does I think shape my column writing. I mean one of the things that I came to understand is the importance of what social psychologists call complexifying an issue, so that if you're talking about gun policy, for example, you don't have a conversation about the Second Amendment. You don't have a conversation about gun control or whatever. You have a conversation about some area at the margin. So, you say, okay, if you have a felony conviction, you can't buy a firearm. Well, what about somebody who's had a violent misdemeanor conviction in the last 3 years? Should they also be barred from having a firearm? People may or may not agree with me, but they're willing to have that conversation. Or that right now in Oregon to buy a handgun you have to be 18. In Wyoming, one of the most pro-gun states, this age is 21. Should we maybe make it 21, and again people are willing to engage on that and then they push me back on the things that they care about. These are people that I care a lot about. I think they care about me. They can't believe I'm so misguided. But they hope that I'll finally come to.

ANDELMAN: One final question from the great Mike Kandel.

QUESTION Kandel:  If you were a student at Columbia right now, what would you be doing and saying?

KRISTOF:  If I were writing in The Daily Spectator…I was so glad students cared about the world and wanted to engage in the world and felt empathy and compassion for people dying in Gaza needlessly. And so I really admired that engagement. I thought that the campus protests at Columbia and on a lot of campuses, though, were not helpful to Gazans.

I think the metric of progressivism should be progress. Good intentions are not enough. What matters is outcomes and it was not obvious to me that the campus protests at Columbia or at a lot of other campuses overall had useful outcomes. In contrast it seemed to me that very often the upshot was that instead of talking about kids starving to death in Gaza, we were talking about what to do with tent encampments at Columbia or Yale or elsewhere—that they diverted rather than focused the attention. And I thought there was also on some campuses a strain of anti-Semitism that undermined the legitimacy. That was my take on that. I think protests can be a really important tool, but I think it's also really important to ensure that they advance some cause and don't risk setting it back. Maybe that's because I covered a lot of protests that actually did result in setbacks.

ANDELMAN [holds up book] : Well no setbacks here. And in fact, we should be Chasing Hope. This is the book. And this is the author and we thank you very much and everybody go out and buy it. If you can't get it at the door, you can get it immediately on Kindle and you'll be able to download it and read it beginning this afternoon or this evening, which you should do, one and all. So thank you very much Nick.