Amy Wang
Wang is the former books columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive. She interviewed Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn about their 2020 book, “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope.”
When the door closed on Nicholas Kristof’s campaign for Oregon governor, a window opened.
“All of a sudden, I had time on my hands,” Kristof said recently from his family’s Yamhill County farm. “It seemed the perfect moment to do a book.”
Kristof, a longtime New York Times columnist, left his job in October 2021 to run as a Democrat for governor in the state where his family put down roots when he was 12. Three months later, in January 2022, then-Secretary of State Shemia Fagan ruled that Kristof didn’t meet Oregon’s three-year residency requirement for gubernatorial candidates. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld Fagan’s decision, ending Kristof’s campaign.
The book he wrote afterward is a 433-page memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” that came out in May, shortly after Kristof’s 65th birthday. “I thought that the narrative of my career would be a way to try to bring readers into issues that I care about, from journalism to human rights around the world to the challenges that we face in politics,” he said.
Kristof started in journalism at age 16 as a part-time reporter with the News-Register in McMinnville. Then came stints at the Statesman Journal in Salem, The Oregonian and The Washington Post before he was hired at age 25 by The New York Times, which has been his professional home since.
He’s won two Pulitzer Prizes, one with wife Sheryl WuDunn in 1990 for their coverage of the Chinese government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, and one in 2006 for what judges called “graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world.”
Here are excerpts from a recent conversation with Kristof about life since his gubernatorial run and “Chasing Hope.”
Q: Did you ever think again about trying to run for office?
Kristof: I don’t think so. I mean, it was an amazing adventure. I’m glad I did. It was fascinating to have been so proximate to politics for so long, and then it really was fairly different on the other side.
As a journalist or as an author, I’m paid to be provocative and to piss people off periodically. And when I diagnose Portland’s problems, I think one reason is that the mayor has sometimes been too reluctant to piss people off. And I came to understand why, in political life, it’s really hard to show that kind of leadership and bulldog one’s way through, past constituencies that you rely on and that don’t want you to do something or want you to say something different.
So I came to value the perch that I have right now where I can absolutely antagonize people every hour of the day.
Q: You recently wrote a column, “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?,” taking West Coast liberalism to task for the problems that Oregon and other West Coast states are facing. What’s the response been like?
Kristof: Well, there were certainly a lot of West Coast liberals who were upset and angry. I was not surprised that I had a lot of eggs thrown at me, metaphorically.
I was actually surprised by how many liberals wrote and said, “Just right.” You can be deeply liberal and not want your catalytic converter stolen. You just can’t walk through San Francisco or Portland or Seattle today and think, “This is a triumph of good governance.” And that is as obvious to liberals as to conservatives. Because I am a liberal, I have more latitude to say that and get away with it. And I think that I also have some responsibility to do so.
Q: You wrote in your book that your campaign was leaning toward the message “Oregon can do better.” Are you still behind that message?
Kristof: Oh, absolutely.
It’s great that we have compassion and good intentions. But the metric is whether you do get people housed, whether you do get people through high school and into college or some kind of tactical training program into a job. Whether you get treatment for people with substance use disorder and can help get them off drugs.
Good intentions are not enough, and I think in Portland, Seattle, elsewhere, we’ve too often let ourselves be lulled by our good intentions. We pay too much attention to inputs and not enough to outcomes.
Q: Did you have a particular goal for this memoir?
Kristof: I was particularly pissed off at the denunciations of journalism. You know, those T-shirts (“Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.”) I find it painful to see those. And so, I wanted to say something about journalism. But you know, in fairness, I also think that we in journalism have screwed up an awful lot. And so I thought this was a chance to write about that.
I was troubled by the state of the state. My 10-minute political career didn’t do anything to address that. But, you know, maybe at the margins, writing about some of these issues can help illuminate some of those challenges.
More broadly, I look at the number of Americans who’ve been left behind, and I think the country has really failed them. I think that there tends to be in liberal circles, like my own, condescension toward a lot of working-class Americans that I think is unhelpful and wrong. And so, to the extent that is probably who my book audience is, it was a way of pointing out the distress in a lot of parts from America and the need to do a better job to try to lift people up and provide more opportunity.
Q: What was your favorite part of this book to write?
Kristof: I think the China parts, partly because democracy has been under great stress in the United States. And I think we can learn something from the heroic struggle for democracy that I witnessed at Tiananmen Square (in Beijing in 1989) and before and after.
I think that period also illuminated some really tough ethical challenges for journalists. When I helped Liu Xiang, this dissident, escape from China, that was probably the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever done. It could well have been a firing offense. But it was also one of the things that I’m proudest of having done.
Q: What was the most challenging part of this book for you to write?
Kristof: One of the things that I had wondered about was the accuracy of my memories. So, I would often call up people I hadn’t spoken to for decades and say, “This is how I remember it, how do you remember it?” And actually, our memories really did coincide to a remarkable degree. Probably because these were really traumatic, particular memories that did tend to be frozen in your consciousness. And I think I had a clearer sense in writing about one incident after another that at times I really had been unfair to Sheryl and the kids – that I was often so focused on getting the story in Darfur, or in Iraq, that I probably took more risks than I should have.
It’s an impossible balance. How do you not cover genocide abroad? But how do you risk leaving your kids without a dad? There’s no real balance to be found. But in writing the book, I saw just how often I had placed that burden on them.
Q: What advice would you give your 25-year-old self?
Kristof: It’s the distinction between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues.
I was certainly very focused on being the youngest national correspondent at the Times or the youngest foreign correspondent at the Times, getting a Pulitzer, and those obviously were certainly very satisfying.
But the things that have been most important to my well-being have been much more about family, have been much more about having friends with whom I can laugh and heal. And the most important journalism I’ve done has really been about trying to make a difference here and there, whether or not there is any prize at the end of it.
I would advise myself back then to find a purpose and to harness your journalism to that purpose and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
