Nicholas Kristof Interview (page: 6 / 7) Journalist, Author & Columnist	Print Interview

Could you tell us about your family background? Where were your parents from?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: My dad's an immigrant. He was born in an area that is now the Ukraine, but at the time he was growing up was Romania. He was born shortly before (the Treaty of) Versailles, when it was Austria-Hungary. If you ask my dad where he's from, then he says Romania. His sister would say "Oh, I'm Armenian," and his brother would say, "I'm Polish." He spoke to his sister in Romanian and to his brother in Polish. So they were kind of a -- generally sort of a wonderfully complex family, and my mother, her family had been in America forever. They're academics. So I grew up in rural Oregon on a farm, but with a big dose of academia pumped in on the side.

What did your parents teach?

Nicholas Kristof: My dad teaches political science with a focus on Eastern Europe and geography, and my mom teaches art history. So we tended to travel a fair amount. I got dragged through every art museum in the world. When you're seven years old, that can be a burden.

Did they expect you to take school seriously?

Nicholas Kristof: Yeah. I would say though, that...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Right now I live in a New York suburb, and everybody believes it's so important to send your kids to a great school. I actually went through a fairly bad school system, if you will. It's rural Oregon, farm town. My seventh and eighth grade science teacher, in fact, did not believe in evolution. Very few of the kids in my high school class went on to college. It sounds flip to say it, but I ended up almost believing in bad schools, if you will. That at least there is something to be said for a community where -- and I guess maybe that's how I'd put it -- that what is more important than academic preparation from teachers is the sense of community, of people, teachers and other students who believe in you, who support you, who endorse your curiosity, help you reach for some kind of new goals. So while my school was pretty lousy in some sense, I found it a terrific preparation.

What kind of books did you like to read when you were young? Do any stand out in your memory?

Nicholas Kristof: Don't tell anybody, but I was a huge Freddy the Pig fan. Just the most wonderful fiction books for kids in the world, and I must have read each of them about 20 times. But I was a huge reader of just about everything.

How about when you got older? Fiction? Nonfiction?

Nicholas Kristof: Fiction, nonfiction. I have an interest in history, in science. I tend to have pretty broad tastes in literature. Maybe that's one of the reasons I gravitated toward journalism. One of the nice things about journalism is that you don't have to pick any one area, you can learn about all kinds of things. You have an excuse to ask questions about all kinds of topics. Maybe that emanated from originally being interested in books about science, history, linguistics, everything.

Did you have siblings?

Nicholas Kristof: No. I'm a loner.

What was Yamhill like?

Nicholas Kristof: Yamhill? Yamhill is a little farm town and there were about 500 people in it. In fact, we lived on a farm four miles away from Yamhill. We have a cherry orchard. We have pie cherries, if you like pies. Our cherries were sold to Mrs. Smith's Pies, and still are. So eat your Mrs. Smith's frozen cherry pies! At various times we had cattle, sheep and hogs. A little less successfully, geese at one point.

How do professors run a farm?

Nicholas Kristof: Kind of badly.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Our farm used to be a bit of a joke in the area. For example, when we were deciding what livestock to raise, we did what professors do. We went and got out a bunch of books in the library about animal husbandry. And the books that we had strongly recommended sheep, because sheep can get more grass out of a given acre than cattle can, or other animals. You don't have to feed them. So we ended up with sheep. And one of the books we got on sheep raising recommended Corridale sheep, which is a breed used in New Zealand. What we didn't notice is that the book was actually published in New Zealand, and it turned out that Corridale sheep are essentially unsuited because they're used mostly or largely for wool, and there's really no wool market in the U.S. And in addition, the area we were raised in, where we were raising the sheep, has a lot of coyotes. So the coyotes immediately decided we were essentially serving them lunch. So we got another book on how you deal with this, and the book recommended a breed of dog to protect sheep called the Kuvasz, a Hungarian guard dog. So we spent quite a bit of money buying this Kuvasz to protect our sheep. First thing the Kuvasz did, it ate one of our sheep. In the area, if your dog kills a sheep, then you have to kill it. You have to shoot it, right away. And so we had a big cover-up and didn't tell anybody what was going on. And the dog actually became a terrific guard dog and protected the other sheep. But as long as that dog was alive we never could breathe a word about its initial sin.

I think we did provide a considerable amount of comic amusement to other farmers in the area.

You once described yourself as a country hick who thought it would be amusing to go to Harvard. How did that come about?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: When I was applying for colleges, I really didn't have much basis to figure out where I might go. Stanford was, for some reason, in my mind. That's a West Coast school and so I always sort of thought, "Well, I'll apply to Stanford as a good university in the region." When I was applying, I thought, "Well, I can't just apply to one out-of-state school, and so I also applied to Harvard and to Princeton. I didn't really know what I was doing. I had never seen the Harvard campus before I applied, or Princeton. But I think that at the end of the day I was basically the beneficiary of affirmative action. Harvard wanted clueless farm kids from rural Oregon, and I fit that bill perfectly. So I was able to parlay that, and I arrived at Harvard not really having much idea of where I was or what I was doing.

Do you think it was an advantage in your subsequent career that you weren't rooted in the Eastern establishment? You weren't a jaded big city kid.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: I think it is true that journalism too often is drawn from a fairly narrow contingent of society, and indeed that a lot of our elites are disproportionately drawn from a fairly narrow stratum in the Northeast. I think that some of my writing about politics, for example, has been inspired, has been informed by a sense of the people that I grew up with in Yamhill, Oregon. I've always been, in my writing, I've been much more sympathetic to evangelicals than most New Yorkers, if you will. And I think that's because Yamhill is part of the Bible Belt, and I kind of -- I understand, I think, that community. I don't agree with it on a lot of things, but there are a lot of things about it that I very much admire.

What activities were you involved in at Harvard? We know you worked for the daily paper, The Crimson. Was that hard to balance with your studies?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: I arrived at Harvard with some jeans and a few T-shirts and got engaged in all kinds of activities and one was The Crimson. I did an awful lot of writing for it, and I enjoyed it a lot. But I think I did end up just working too many hours on The Crimson, because it was fun. And then in my spring semester I really decided that I was at Harvard to get an education and that I wanted to make sure that the priority for me was education, was my course work. So I backed off a little bit from The Crimson. I think that was probably the right decision.

Some of your fellow writers recall that you would help out with galley proofing, pulling all-nighters to get the paper out.

Nicholas Kristof: I think people's recollections may be a little generous, because there were a lot of people who were helping out, who were public-spirited. It really was a team activity. I was very much a part of that team. I think my background helped a little bit.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. This was the period of the rise of Reagan, and I think a lot of people in the Northeast, a lot of people at Harvard, just couldn't understand the popularity of Reagan. What is it about? How can it be that he would rise like that? Coming from Yamhill, I knew exactly what kind of people were voting for him and why. So I think that that experience, that background helped a lot. And in general, I think that one of the mistakes of American education is that intellectuals tend to be intellectually curious about Hinduism, about all kinds of things, but don't tend to be intellectually curious about kind of mainstream America, if you will, about blue collar life around the country. I think that we need to figure out ways for the education system -- and for elites -- to connect with that, to the touchstone of real America.

Nicholas Kristof Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7