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Willem Kolff
Pioneer of Artificial Organs
Sophia Schafstad was the first patient where you can honestly say she would have died had she not been treated with dialysis. And she was in a prison right after the war, for collaborating with the Germans and many of my fellow countrymen would have liked to wring her neck. And, she was brought to us in renal failure. My duty is not to wring her neck, but to treat her. And, we treated her. And, she was comatose when she came in. And after so many hours of treatment I bent over her and said, "Mrs. Schafstad, can you hear me?" And she slowly opened her eyes and said, "I'm going to divorce my husband," and she did.
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Henry Kravis
Financier and Investor
Everybody would come to me and say, "Are you Ray Kravis's son?" And I would just beam and say, "I didn't know you knew my dad." "Oh, yes, you know, I worked with your dad on this transaction, or on this company in the oil business." And I thought about it, but I said, "Look, as proud as I am of my father, I don't want to be known as Ray Kravis's son. I want to do something myself." And I hope my children will do something on their own. My dad helped me, was there, is a very loving and supportive father. But I said, "I've got to do it myself." As a kid, my mother says to me, "You know, you were always 'me, myself' as a kid. You wanted to tie your shoes when you didn't even know how to tie your shoes. But you had to do it yourself."
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Nicholas Kristof
Journalist, Author & Columnist
Our own most difficult crisis came when we had -- there was a young man called Liu Xiang, who had helped us cover Tsinghua University. He was a student, and he had once registered us in the more open time to get into Tsinghua. And afterward, there he was, in this crackdown that got him into trouble. He was interrogated regularly about it. Finally he thought he was about to be arrested, and he fled. He ended up being imprisoned and he escaped from prison and came back to Beijing and asked for our help. Sheryl and I just agonized over that. One thing that is pretty clear in journalistic ethics is that you don't help an escaped felon leave the country. And if we did that, we would be not only breaking Chinese law, we'd be also risking the closure of the New York Times bureau. We knew we couldn't ask our editors for advice, because a) the phone lines were tapped, but b), they could never endorse us risking the closure of the New York Times bureau. On the other hand, here's a 19-year-old kid who was in trouble because he had helped us and the New York Times readers. If we didn't help him, he was going to be caught at some point, and who knows what would happen to him. We just agonized over our moral responsibilities there. It was also a little bit complicated, because we worried that this might be an effort to set us up. It was a time when the government didn't like my reporting and appeared to be trying to kick us out of the country, and it occurred to us that they might have let him out of prison so that he would then compromise us, catch us breaking the law, and then kick us out of the country. It was an immensely difficult decision, but we finally decided we just had to help him. We helped him, in a way with as few fingerprints as we possibly could. He was able to escape to Hong Kong and I flew down the next day and helped him get to the States. He is now in the States. It was enormously unprofessional and yet absolutely the right thing to do.
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Nicholas Kristof
Journalist, Author & Columnist
I remember there was a man who contacted me, he was involved in the defense establishment. And one of the stories that I covered very aggressively was Chinese military sales, missile sales. He had photos and copies of contracts and other data showing sales by China of certain long-range missiles to Pakistan, which China had denied were taking place. He had all the goods on it, and he wanted money for these materials. One of the principles of journalism is you don't pay for material. So we met many times, and I was trying to convince him to give me the material free, and he was trying to convince me to pay for it. But one of the things you do as a journalist, you try to build a rapport with people, so I would talk about his kids and my kids. He had a wife and a son, a small son. He had a wife and a small son, and he was doing this so that his son would have a little more money and have better toys and have a better future. And it really nagged at me. Finally, I remember at our last meeting, I wasn't trying to get these materials out of him any more, because I knew that if I published my story that there was a real risk that somehow the source would be tracked down and that he'd be executed. That's just how it would end. So I was telling him, "Just go home. Go back. Forget about this. Don't try to sell it to the U.S. Embassy or anybody else. Just go home and forget about it." It was a very non-journalistic thing to do, but I really didn't -- having made that bond with him for my own benefit -- I didn't want to think about that kid growing up without a father.
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