Nicholas D. Kristof - Academy of Achievement

<!doctype html> <html lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head><script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/bundle-playback.js?v=HxkREWBo" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/wombat.js?v=txqj7nKC" charset="utf-8"></script> <script>window.RufflePlayer=window.RufflePlayer||{};window.RufflePlayer.config={"autoplay":"on","unmuteOverlay":"hidden"};</script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/ruffle/ruffle.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> __wm.init("https://web.archive.org/web"); __wm.wombat("http://www.achievement.org:80/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/","20181007212605","https://web.archive.org/","web","/_static/", "1538947565"); </script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/banner-styles.css?v=S1zqJCYt" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/iconochive.css?v=3PDvdIFv" />  <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="57x57" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="144x144" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-144x144.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="60x60" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="120x120" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="76x76" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="152x152" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-196x196.png" sizes="196x196"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-96x96.png" sizes="96x96"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-32x32.png" sizes="32x32"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-16x16.png" sizes="16x16"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-128.png" sizes="128x128"/> <meta name="application-name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#000000"/> <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-144x144.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square70x70logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-70x70.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square150x150logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-150x150.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-wide310x150logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-310x150.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square310x310logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-310x310.png"/> <link href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605cs_/https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600,400italic,600italic,700,700italic" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <title>Nicholas D. Kristof - Academy of Achievement</title>  <meta name="description" content="Twice a week, millions of readers of The New York Times turn to Nicholas Kristof's column for firsthand insights into breaking news from around the world. His travels as a reporter have taken him to 140 countries, including multiple visits to hot spots such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the course of his travels he has survived wars, plane crashes, malaria, and in Indonesia, a mob carrying human heads on pikes. He first joined the Times as an economics correspondent and has since served as the paper's bureau chief in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing and as managing editor of the Sunday Times. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, shared the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China. Week after week, Kristof uses his column to illuminate issues of poverty, global health, and human rights violations. He believes in doing more than writing about the abuses he uncovers, personally intervening to buy the freedom of two enslaved women in Cambodia. The Pulitzer committee cited his eyewitness coverage of the ongoing genocide in Darfur in awarding him a second prize, for Distinguished Commentary, in 2006."/> <link rel="canonical" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/"/> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US"/> <meta property="og:type" content="article"/> <meta property="og:title" content="Nicholas D. Kristof - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:description" content="<p class="inputTextFirst">Twice a week, millions of readers of <i>The New York Times</i> turn to Nicholas Kristof's column for firsthand insights into breaking news from around the world. His travels as a reporter have taken him to 140 countries, including multiple visits to hot spots such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the course of his travels he has survived wars, plane crashes, malaria, and in Indonesia, a mob carrying human heads on pikes.</p> <p class="inputText">He first joined the <i>Times</i> as an economics correspondent and has since served as the paper's bureau chief in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing and as managing editor of the Sunday <i>Times</i>. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, shared the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China.</p> <p class="inputText">Week after week, Kristof uses his column to illuminate issues of poverty, global health, and human rights violations. He believes in doing more than writing about the abuses he uncovers, personally intervening to buy the freedom of two enslaved women in Cambodia. The Pulitzer committee cited his eyewitness coverage of the ongoing genocide in Darfur in awarding him a second prize, for Distinguished Commentary, in 2006.</p>"/> <meta property="og:url" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/"/> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-2005summit-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg"/> <meta property="og:image:width" content="2800"/> <meta property="og:image:height" content="1120"/> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/> <meta name="twitter:description" content="<p class="inputTextFirst">Twice a week, millions of readers of <i>The New York Times</i> turn to Nicholas Kristof's column for firsthand insights into breaking news from around the world. His travels as a reporter have taken him to 140 countries, including multiple visits to hot spots such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the course of his travels he has survived wars, plane crashes, malaria, and in Indonesia, a mob carrying human heads on pikes.</p> <p class="inputText">He first joined the <i>Times</i> as an economics correspondent and has since served as the paper's bureau chief in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing and as managing editor of the Sunday <i>Times</i>. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, shared the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China.</p> <p class="inputText">Week after week, Kristof uses his column to illuminate issues of poverty, global health, and human rights violations. He believes in doing more than writing about the abuses he uncovers, personally intervening to buy the freedom of two enslaved women in Cambodia. The Pulitzer committee cited his eyewitness coverage of the ongoing genocide in Darfur in awarding him a second prize, for Distinguished Commentary, in 2006.</p>"/> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Nicholas D. Kristof - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-2005summit-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg"/> <script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20181007212605\/http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebSite","@id":"#website","url":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20181007212605\/http:\/\/www.achievement.org\/","name":"Academy of Achievement","alternateName":"A museum of living history","potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20181007212605\/http:\/\/www.achievement.org\/search\/{search_term_string}","query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}</script> <script 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/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-2005summit-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg [(max-width:992px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-2005summit-Feature-Image-2800x1120-1400x560.jpg"></div> <div class="display--table"> <div class="display--table-cell"> <figcaption class="feature-area__text ratio-container__text container"> <div class="feature-area__text-inner text-white"> <h2 class="serif-8 feature-area__text-subhead back"><a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever">All achievers</a></h2> <h1 class="serif-1 entry-title feature-area__text-headline">Nicholas D. Kristof</h1> <h5 class="sans-6 feature-area__blurb">Journalist, Author and Columnist</h5> </div> </figcaption> </div> </div> </figure> </header> </div>  <nav class="in-page-nav row fixedsticky"> <ul class="nav text-xs-center clearfix" role="tablist"> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link active" data-toggle="tab" href="#biography" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Biography">Biography</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#profile" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Profile">Profile</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#interview" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Interview">Interview</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#gallery" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Gallery">Gallery</a> </li> </ul> </nav> <article class="post-2638 achiever type-achiever status-publish has-post-thumbnail hentry careers-journalist"> <div class="entry-content container clearfix">  <div class="tab-content"> <div class="tab-pane fade in active" id="biography" role="tabpanel"> <section class="achiever--biography"> <div class="row"> <header class="editorial-article__header col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 text-xs-center"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> <h3 class="serif-3 quote-marks">One of the principles of journalism is you don't lie. You never lie.</h3> </header> </div> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar clearfix"> <h2 class="serif-3 p-b-1">Two Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism</h2> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> April 27, 1959 </dd> </div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><figure id="attachment_10633" style="width: 1500px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10633 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo-.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10633 size-full lazyload" alt="Nicholas Kristof, recipent of the Putlizer Prize for International Reporting and Distinguished Commentary. (Courtesy of Nicholas Kristof)" width="1500" height="2250" data-sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo-.jpg 1500w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo--253x380.jpg 253w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo--507x760.jpg 507w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo-.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Nicholas Kristof, the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting and Distinguished Commentary.</figcaption></figure><p class="inputTextFirst">Nicholas Donabet Kristof was born in Yamhill, Oregon. His father, Ladis Kristof, was an ethnic Armenian from the Carpathian region of Europe, born in a district that changed hands from Austria-Hungary to Romania to the Soviet Union and Ukraine over the course of the 20th century. In the United States, Ladis Kristof became a professor of political science, specializing in Eastern Europe; Nicholas Kristof’s mother was a professor of art history. The Kristofs owned a small cherry farm outside Yamhill, and Nicholas Kristof worked the farm with his parents. Although his parents set high standards for academic achievement, by his own account, the local schools Nicholas Kristof attended were less than demanding.</p> <p class="inputText">Young Kristof discovered his love for journalism editing his junior high school newspaper. In high school, he began working for a local paper, the <i>McMinnville News-Register</i>, and impressed the older reporters with his professionalism and precocious writing ability. After graduating from high school, he took a year off to serve as a state officer of the Future Farmers of America before entering Harvard.</p> <figure id="attachment_16789" style="width: 1971px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-16789 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-16789 size-full lazyload" alt="Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn attend the AOL BUILD Speaker Series at AOL Studios In New York on February 9, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images)" width="1971" height="3000" data-sizes="(max-width: 1971px) 100vw, 1971px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140.jpg 1971w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140-250x380.jpg 250w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140-499x760.jpg 499w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2015: Nicholas Kristof and wife, Sheryl WuDunn, attend the AOL BUILD Speaker Series at AOL Studios In New York.</figcaption></figure> <p class="inputText">At Harvard, Kristof was a major force in the daily newspaper <i>The Crimson</i>. Between terms, he completed an internship at <i>The Washington Post</i>. Despite his journalistic activities, he graduated in only three years, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors, and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study law at Oxford University. Kristof earned first class honors at Oxford, but he was increasingly eager to see the world and pursue a journalistic career. On his first vacation, he headed to Poland. When the communist government of Poland declared martial law to suppress the Solidarity labor movement, Kristof contacted <i>The Washington Post</i> and began filing stories. On another vacation, he backpacked across Africa, writing articles to support his travels. After completing his law degree at Oxford, he considered returning to the United States to continue his legal studies, but instead decided to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Returning to the United States, he joined <i>The New York Times</i> as an economics correspondent in 1984, reporting from Los Angeles, and then Tokyo.</p> <figure id="attachment_16791" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-16791 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-16791 size-full lazyload" alt="Chinese military and demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. (Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" width="2280" height="1536" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237-380x256.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237-760x512.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Chinese military and demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. (Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> <p>In Los Angeles, he had dated a young Wall Street Journal reporter, Sheryl WuDunn. When they were both assigned to Hong Kong, the relationship became more serious and they were soon married. Not long after, Ms. WuDunn was also hired by <i>The New York Times</i>, and the couple moved to Beijing, where they covered the burgeoning democracy movement, exemplified by massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. When the Chinese government sent in the army to disperse the demonstrators, Kristof rushed to the center of the action. The couple’s reporting on the violent suppression of the dissidents earned them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. They are the first married couple ever to share this prize. They recounted their experience of China at length in their 1994 book, <i>China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power</i>.</p> <figure id="attachment_10654" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-10654 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-10654 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1520" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2008: The President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in a lighter moment with Academy of Achievement members Archbishop Desmond Tutu and journalist Nicholas Kristof during the International Achievement Summit in Hawaii.</figcaption></figure><p class="inputText">Having served as <i>The New York Times</i> bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, Kristof and WuDunn published a second book of reflections on their observations, <i>Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia</i> (2000).</p> <p class="inputText">In 2000, after covering the presidential campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush, Kristof took the post of associate managing editor of the <i>Times</i>, responsible for the paper’s popular and voluminous Sunday edition. In 2001, following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he was given his own opinion column, which appears twice weekly, on the “Op-Ed” page, facing the paper’s editorial page.</p> <figure id="attachment_5660" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-5660 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wordpress_2_1292.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-5660 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1549" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wordpress_2_1292.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wordpress_2_1292-380x258.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wordpress_2_1292-760x516.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wordpress_2_1292.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">July 2008: The American Academy of Achievement’s Class of 2008 gather before the Banquet of the Golden Plate ceremonies during the 47th annual International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii.</figcaption></figure> <p class="inputText">Kristof has used his column to illuminate international issues of human rights, global health, poverty and gender inequality, crisscrossing the globe to investigate these situations firsthand. To date, he has lived on four continents and visited 140 countries, all 50 states of the Union, every province in China, and every island in Japan. He has also been at least twice to every country on President Bush’s “axis of evil” list: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.</p> <p>In 2003, Kristof ignited a national scandal by discrediting the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein’s government had tried to buy uranium in Africa. A later column disclosed that the administration had rebuffed overtures from Iran to normalize relations and give up nuclear weapons development.</p> <figure id="attachment_10650" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-10650 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-10650 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1466" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371-380x244.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371-760x489.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Awards Council member General Wesley Clark, USA presenting the American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award to Nicholas Kristof during the 47th annual International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.</figcaption></figure><p class="inputText">Kristof has written dozens of columns about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and visited the area numerous times. In 2006, Kristof won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary “for his 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.” He has received every other honor in American journalism, including the George Polk Award and the award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.</p> <figure id="attachment_10641" style="width: 2000px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10641 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10641 size-full lazyload" alt="Refugees from the violence in Darfur dig for water in the arid soil of a makeshift refugee camp in Sudan. Nicholas Kristof received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his reporting that focused on the genocide in Darfur and gave a voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world. (AP Images/Ben Curtis)" width="2000" height="1249" data-sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299.jpg 2000w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299-380x237.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299-760x475.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Refugees from the violence in Darfur dig for water in the arid soil of a makeshift refugee camp in Sudan. Nicholas Kristof received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his reporting that focused on the genocide in Darfur. (AP)</figcaption></figure><p class="inputText">Since 2006, <i>The New York Times</i> has held the “Win a Trip With Nick Kristof” essay contest, offering college students and high school teachers the opportunity to join Kristof on assignment in Africa. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, have written four acclaimed books, including the No. 1 <em>New York Times</em> bestseller <em>Half the Sky: Turning Opression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide</em>. Their “vibrant portraits of ordinary citizens who are motivated to effect real and dramatic change present a rallying call to action and a voice for the power of volunteerism.” When he is not on the road, Nicholas Kristof lives in Scarsdale, New York with his wife and their three children.</p></body></html> <div class="clearfix"> </div> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="profile" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <header class="editorial-article__header"> <figure class="text-xs-center"> <img class="inductee-badge" src="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/inducted-badge@2x.png" alt="Inducted Badge" width="120" height="120"/> <figcaption class="serif-3 text-brand-primary"> Inducted in 2008 </figcaption> </figure> </header> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <dl class="clearfix m-b-0"> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Career</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> <div><a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.journalist">Journalist</a></div> </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> April 27, 1959 </dd> </div> </dl> </aside> <article class="col-md-8 editorial-article clearfix"> <p class="inputTextFirst">Twice a week, millions of readers of <i>The New York Times</i> turn to Nicholas Kristof’s column for firsthand insights into breaking news from around the world. His travels as a reporter have taken him to 140 countries, including multiple visits to hot spots such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In the course of his travels he has survived wars, plane crashes, malaria, and in Indonesia, a mob carrying human heads on pikes.</p> <p class="inputText">He first joined the <i>Times</i> as an economics correspondent and has since served as the paper’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing and as managing editor of the Sunday <i>Times</i>. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, shared the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China.</p> <p class="inputText">Week after week, Kristof uses his column to illuminate issues of poverty, global health, and human rights violations. He believes in doing more than writing about the abuses he uncovers, personally intervening to buy the freedom of two enslaved women in Cambodia. The Pulitzer committee cited his eyewitness coverage of the ongoing genocide in Darfur in awarding him a second prize, for Distinguished Commentary, in 2006.</p> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="interview" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <header class="col-md-12 text-xs-center m-b-2"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> </header> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <h2 class="serif-3 achiever--biography-subtitle">Two Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism</h2> <div class="sans-2">Kailua-Kona, Hawaii</div> <div class="sans-2">July 3, 2008</div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8">   <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>You and your wife, Sheryl, won the Pulitzer Prize for your coverage of the democracy movement in China, and the government’s violent reaction at Tiananmen Square. What was it like to be in China at that time?</b></span></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/aA6w17YHXzU?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_49_28_23.Still011-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_49_28_23.Still011-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">Nicholas Kristof: We had done a lot of interviews with Chinese, and the period before Tiananmen was just an unbelievable time to be a journalist in China, because it was becoming more open. We were able to develop very good friendships with quite senior people. I remember at one point, in fact, interviewing a high-level advisor, and his next appointment — after we had lunch — his next appointment was in Zhongnanhai, which is the compound for the leaders. He didn’t have a vehicle, so I said, “Do you want me to take you?” And what do you know, I was able actually to drive him right in the compound, right into Zhongnanhai, with me as a driver, me with a foreign car. We look back on the period of openness, when we had a lot of friends. They were typically Communist party reformers or in the Communist party apparatus, and that became very, very useful then, a few months later, when the crackdown came and we had channels to find out what was going on.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Can you describe the crackdown?</b></span></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/YJp2DYLvXT8?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_02_16_13.Still008-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_02_16_13.Still008-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Nicholas Kristof: When the demonstrations began, there was a lot of giddy expectation in the West that if you’ve got a million students in the streets that the people will prevail. “The people united will never be defeated” kind of thing. And in fact, I think any student of Chinese history knew that the people united are often defeated, and that courage and integrity are no match for AK-47s. And so we didn’t share (that) entirely. We hoped for the best, we hoped for a peaceful outcome, but we also were prepared for a bloody d茅nouement, and indeed our sources had told us that was what was going to happen.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>They knew?</b></span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1">Nicholas Kristof: Yes. Martial law had been declared on the night of May 19, 1989, and that was two weeks before the crackdown, but already at that point, a lot of people were telling us that it was going to end with bloodshed. I remember meeting with one man who had been a senior official, and we met secretly, and he told me, “I’m going to go to jail. All of my friends and colleagues are going to go to jail, and the streets will be red with blood.”</span></p> <figure id="attachment_10651" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10651 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10651 size-full lazyload" alt="The 1989 democracy movement comes to a violent end. Student demonstrators carry a blood-soaked victim to safety as the Chinese army drives the demonstrators from Tiananmen Square. (漏 David Turnley/CORBIS)" width="2280" height="3469" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236-250x380.jpg 250w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236-500x760.jpg 500w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">The 1989 democracy movement comes to a violent end. Student demonstrators carry a blood-soaked victim to safety as the Chinese Army drives the demonstrators from Tiananmen Square. (© David Turnley/CORBIS)</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Why would he go to jail?</b></span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s2">Nicholas Kristof: Because he had supported the wrong person, and partly because he was speaking with me. He said that the reformers would be jailed, and he was right. So on June 4, 1989, the troops moved in, slaughtered people, and indeed, a lot of the reformers, including that man, were imprisoned.</span></p></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/oup_HDaIOOM?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_27_23_24.Still001-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_27_23_24.Still001-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">So we were expecting bloodshed, or at least thought it was a strong possibility, and then I remember the night of June 3rd, there had been particularly ominous rumblings that day that things were afoot. And at about ten p.m., suddenly a bunch of people started calling that troops are moving in and they’re opening fire. And so there were a bunch of roadblocks on the roads, set up by the protesters so tanks — soldiers — could not just come in. I couldn’t drive there, so I took my bicycle and bicycled like mad to Tiananmen Square and parked my bike there, under the Mao portrait, under the Chairman Mao portrait. And it was just about when the soldiers were arriving from the other direction, and they opened fire on the crowd that I was in. So I was pushed back, left my bike there, and next time, weeks later when the square was opened up, there was a tank sitting right where my bike had been. I stayed with the crowd for several hours. We were being pushed back. The crowd would be pushed back, and they’d get very angry, and they’d start to go forward a little bit, and kids would start throwing stones, and the troops would open fire again. And then there’d be a lull, and then they would go forward. I remember trying always to stay back from the very front of the crowd so that there’d be other people that would absorb the bullets, but also then realizing at one point that I was a few inches taller than the average Chinese in front of me, so that a crucial part of me was actually exposed in it. After that I kept lower.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I was taking notes, and I had a notebook, and it’s still stained with sweat, mostly sweat of fear. It was very scary being out on the square that night and watching. The thing that I maybe remember most…</span></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/XC1DaFu_0BA?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=28&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.01_01_11_27.Still010-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.01_01_11_27.Still010-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">There had been a big discussion, and there still is, about the propriety of democracy in a developing country. Are people ready for it? If they’re illiterate, then can they really make the decisions necessary in a democracy? And it’s obviously a valid question to think about, but that night, the real heroes of it weren’t the university students, the teachers. They were the uneducated, often illiterate peasants who were the rickshaw drivers. Whenever the troops opened fire, and we would all run back and run away, then these rickshaw drivers would, with incredible courage, go out and pedal their little bicycle rickshaws out toward the soldiers, into this no-man’s land. Pick up the bodies of the kids who’d been killed or injured, put them on the back of their rickshaws, and then drive back toward the hospitals. It was an unbelievable display of courage, and if you’d asked them what is democracy, they certainly couldn’t have given you an elegant definition of it, but they were risking their lives for it. And I’ve never forgotten that display of courage, and I think there’s a lot for us all to learn from that the next time we sort of paternalistically say that, “Well, people may not quite be ready for democracy.”</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p><strong>Where was your wife in all this?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: My wife was at home that evening, filing her story. It was actually kind of agonizing for her and for my editors, because it was a Saturday night, when we have early deadlines. In the course of being shot at, I’d quite forgotten that it was Saturday night and that the deadlines were early. After I’d stayed for quite a while in this crowd, being shot at, of course I couldn’t get back to my bike. We’d been driven well away from that. But I ran to the hospital and interviewed some doctors there and then I ran back home. It was quite a bit later than I should have been back, and so they’d been quite worried about it.</p> <p><strong>You failed to file when they expected you to file?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Yes. I was at least an hour late coming back. I hadn’t appreciated, since it was a Saturday night, early deadlines, so they thought that maybe the reason that I wasn’t coming back was that I’d been shot, as opposed to just having a very bad sense of the time.</p> <p><strong>Did your wife know what was going on? It wasn’t covered on Chinese TV, was it?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: No, but they knew what was going on. There were guns going off, and she was on the phone with New York, who was wondering, where’s Nick? So she knew exactly what was going on.</p> <figure id="attachment_16833" style="width: 2222px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-16833 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-16833 size-full lazyload" alt="Goddess of Democracy at sunset during the protests at Tiananmen Square. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" width="2222" height="3291" data-sizes="(max-width: 2222px) 100vw, 2222px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019.jpg 2222w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019-257x380.jpg 257w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019-513x760.jpg 513w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Goddess of Democracy at sunset during the protests at Tiananmen Square. (Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>It must have been harrowing for her.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: It was. I haven’t given her gray hairs, because she doesn’t have any gray hairs, but it can be a difficult thing to be a partner of somebody who is a journalist in this kind of situation.</p> <p><strong>Did the fear factor remain after that one day?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: There was a period for about the next week when the soldiers were doing a fair amount of shooting. I think the moment that I was really sobered was less that first night when I was in the crowd of people, because it was a big crowd. There were a lot of people being shot, but that was in a crowd of more than a thousand. Maybe that gave me a false confidence.</p></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/219yzKVynXg?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.01_19_55_27.Still006-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.01_19_55_27.Still006-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">The next day we sneaked into the hospital. The soldiers had ringed the hospital, but some friendly doctors smuggled me in through an underground tunnel from a nearby building, and not only were all the beds filled, but the aisles were full of kids who’d been shot. I talked to them, and it was clear that some of them were people who had taken a great risk. They had been in the front of the crowd. But there were an awful lot of them who had taken a very minor risk. I mean, they were taking risks comparable to those I had taken, or even lesser risks, but their luck had run out, and that was scary, to talk to people who had done exactly what I’d done and their number had come up. Being in that hospital corridor, stained with blood, in general it was a difficult time, and then also, a lot of our friends were imprisoned, were fleeing the country.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/2yddJniJBb8?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_19_11_21.Still009-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_19_11_21.Still009-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/integrity/">Integrity</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>Our own most difficult crisis came when we had 鈥斅爐here 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 <i>New York Times</i> 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 <i>New York Times</i> bureau. On the other hand, here’s a 19-year-old kid who was in trouble because he had helped us and the <em>New York Times</em> 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 U.S. It was enormously unprofessional and yet absolutely the right thing to do.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td class="td1" valign="top"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Once you left China, how did you get back in? They let you back?</b></span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1">Nicholas Kristof: They let me back in. I did have a multiple-entry visa, but the foreign ministry and the state security ministry were debating whether to expel me from China.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>That was a hard-won Pulitzer Prize.</b></span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1">Nicholas Kristof: It was, but it also made us feel kind of guilty. Sheryl and I were delighted that we’d won it, of course, but we’d had an awful lot of help from a tremendous number of Chinese. We had won this great glory, but a lot of Chinese were in prison. They certainly weren’t getting any of the credit. And that was kind of difficult. Things became better in subsequent years when more people were released and were able to help some people in some ways. It’s an incredibly difficult situation, to try to figure out what your ethical responsibilities are in a dictatorial regime where you do have some obligation to follow the law, and yet you also have an obligation to other human beings to be decent to them and to help them where you can — navigating that, figuring out to what degree to put Chinese friends at risk.</span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/brPkHD5F05g?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_27_23_24.Still001-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.00_27_23_24.Still001-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/integrity/">Integrity</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">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 鈥斅爃aving made that bond with him for my own benefit 鈥斅營 didn’t want to think about that kid growing up without a father.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><figure id="attachment_10643" style="width: 2048px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10643 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10643 size-full lazyload" alt="Soldiers loyal to General Laurent Kabila enter Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1997. Nicholas Kristof was detained by Kabila's forces in the midst of their revolt against President Mobutu Sese Seko. (Corinne Dufka 漏 Reuters/CORBIS)" width="2048" height="1331" data-sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933.jpg 2048w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933-380x247.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933-760x494.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Soldiers loyal to General Laurent Kabila enter Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997. Nicholas Kristof was detained by Kabila’s forces in the midst of their revolt against President Mobutu Sese Seko.</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>In journalism classes, you’re told to be objective and not put yourself into it. Clearly you found that you couldn’t stay completely out of the story.</b></span></p></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/KyewBuHjU1Y?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=98&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.01_03_44_14.Still011-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Kristof-Nicholas-2008-HDCAM-1of3-Orig.01_03_44_14.Still011-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/courage/">Courage</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">Nicholas Kristof: Journalistic ethics often don’t work in the real world. They’re important principles, but there are times when principles just don’t work. For example, you should obey the law, but not if that is going to lead to the execution of somebody who’s helped you. One of the principles of journalism is you don’t lie. You never lie. You’re in the truth business. In the Congo, I was once caught by a Tutsi leader who was busy massacring Hutu. I shouldn’t have been there. I was very worried about my own safety, and I lied through my teeth to this guy.<span class="Apple-converted-space">聽 </span>I told him that his commander, General Kabila, had authorized me to be there and sent his greetings. Well, this commander didn’t believe a word of it. Why would the commander send me into an area where he’s busy exterminating one tribe? But he couldn’t reach his commander on the radio, and didn’t quite know what to do. So finally, after about 45 minutes or an hour, he let me go. Well, it was at some level utterly inappropriate to lie. On the other hand, if you’re trying to save your own life or somebody else’s, absolutely. Lie.</p> </div> </div>     <aside class="collapse" id="full-interview">    <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p><strong>How did you become interested in journalism?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: In the eighth grade, there was an organizational meeting to have a school newspaper. I didn’t show up. A bunch of other kids did. I think a bunch of them wanted to actually work on a paper, but none of them really wanted to edit it. They were trying to figure out how to reconcile that, and what they decided to do was they elected me editor in my absence! Since I wasn’t there to protest, I became editor. And then I found I really liked it, and really enjoyed both, just the aesthetic of writing, and also the ego thrill of the byline. And so that was my beginnings as a journalist.</p> <p><strong>How did you start writing professionally?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: There’s a local newspaper that came out initially twice a week, later three times a week, called the <em>News Register</em> in McMinnville, Oregon. And when I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, then I signed up to write for them. And the editor of it, he knew that — it’s a farming area — that he needed to cover farming, but he didn’t know anything about it. And as a result, he couldn’t actually determine I didn’t know anything about it either. So as a high school student I covered farming in the area, and again, I just found it extraordinary to run around, talk to people, find out about things that were interesting, and then get paid for it. So that was a major step along my road to being a journalist.</p> <p><strong>One of your old classmates said you were raised to be self-reliant. Do you think that’s true?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Yeah, I do think that is true. My parents in general had a lot of confidence that I would always — that things would work out. When I was at Oxford, I happened to be taking a vacation in Poland when martial law was declared, so all communications were severed. There I was in Poland, and a local TV station heard about this and came out to do an interview with my dad. And the story they were looking for was, “Local family grieves as son lost behind in martial law Poland.” It was a very unsatisfying interview for them, because my dad kept saying, “Oh, he’ll be fine. He’ll get out okay.” And they kept saying, “You must be worried!” and “No. He’ll be fine.” So I think that my parents did manage to instill in me the idea that you can look after yourself and get through problems.</p> <p><strong>Could you describe your experience in Poland? Talk about being at the right place at the wrong time!</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: If you’re a journalist, it was the right place at the right time. I’d been traveling through Poland, partly because I had some relatives there, and then we just arrived in the town of Krakow when martial law was declared. I had worked for <em>The Washington Post</em> as a summer intern, so I knew that they would want stories. So I went out to the big steel plant, where there were a lot of workers facing off with a bunch of soldiers, and I explained that I wanted to write about things. They took me around the fence, away from the soldiers, and showed me how to climb over the fence. I got inside, went around and talked to people and I got some very good stories. And I was able to get them out of Poland to <em>The Washington Post</em> by having people carry them out. Other reporters, the real reporters, weren’t able for the most part to get stories out. So <em>The Washington Post</em> was very grateful. My stories attracted a certain amount of interest at a time when there was tremendous curiosity about what was going on and very little information. So that certainly helped my journalism career as well.</p> <p><strong>Did you worry about your safety?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: There was one point when we were inside the steel mill, when suddenly the word spread that the army’s going to attack in ten minutes. There was a moment there that was scary. But by and large, I’d say it felt reasonably orderly, and in general I found that when you’re in a nasty country where there’s order, where there are police and soldiers and a dictator who controls things, that then you tend to be rather safer. The places that scare me are those where there is no rule of anybody, just a bunch of drunken soldiers. When I was at Oxford I had another trip, my first real trip through sub-Saharan Africa with a friend there, Dan Esty. And we kind of backpacked through West Africa. And there was one occasion when we were traveling through Ghana, which had just had a coup and was under military control. We were stopped at a roadblock by two drunken soldiers, and that was very, very scary, because you realized that these soldiers, they might let you go, or they might kill you and throw your bodies in the underbrush.</p> <p><strong>They were drunk and they had weapons?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: They had guns. There was really nothing we could do about it. We could try to influence that decision at the margins, we might or might not succeed. And in the end they robbed us, but they did let us go. But I think that that was a very useful lesson early in my journalism career, that things can go very badly wrong. At one moment you can be going down a road and things are perfect, and the next moment you’ve got some drunk soldiers who just may kill you. That fear that I felt when they were holding us for maybe 45 minutes or so in the jungle, that has never entirely left me. And that lesson, that things can go very badly wrong very quickly, I’ve always remembered that. And I’ve tried to use the lesson of that, the need to be as safe as one can, in difficult situations.</p> <p><strong>It doesn’t sound like you go out of your way to court danger, but doing the kind of work you do, you have to take risks, don’t you?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: As a journalist, you have to balance the risks against the benefits of getting the story out. There are times when there is no other way to get the story but to endure a certain amount of risk. But when you do that, you need to go in with eyes wide open. You need to know exactly what you’re getting into. I have a bunch of rules for myself. You stop at every village, you ask what the situation is like between this village and the next village, you look for fresh tire tracks. If there are any land mines in the area, then you always want to make sure you go on fresh tire tracks to reduce the risk of mines. You carry a certain amount of money so that if some soldiers with guns want to rob you — no fuss — you give them a decoy wallet or some other money to make them happy, and you just learn to kind of be soothing with unpleasant people. And so there are ways that don’t make the risk disappear, but make it more manageable. And then, you still have to balance that risk against the benefit of getting that story that may not be gettable any other way.</p> <figure id="attachment_10654" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10654 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10654 size-full lazyload" alt="The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, enjoys a lighter moment with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and journalist Nicholas Kristof during the International Achievement Summit." width="2280" height="1520" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, enjoys a lighter moment with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and journalist Nicholas Kristof during the International Achievement Summit.</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Did you ever consider a career other than journalism?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I didn’t really at that point have other ambitions. Later on, there was a close call. There was some risk that I might have become a lawyer or a law professor. I did, after college, study law. I thought about becoming a law professor. But there was one crucial week where I had to make a decision, and I ended up as a journalist. move to Cairo story?</p> <p><strong>What led you to study law?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: When I was graduating, it was pretty much legally obligatory to go to law school if you didn’t go to med school. It was just the natural instinctive reaction, that everybody, if they didn’t know what they wanted to do, went to law school. So I did. I won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford and studied law there.</p> <p><strong>As a Rhodes Scholar, do you have to apply for a particular subject?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Correct. I’d never been to Oxford, but I looked through a catalogue and I saw that Magdalen College sure looked pretty, so I applied to Magdalen College. There were a lot of disciplines. I thought about international relations, but as I said, it was sort of intuitive at that point that young people should study law. So I studied law and I came dangerously close to enjoying it. So there was some real risk that I would have ended up as a lawyer. Thank heaven I didn’t!</p> <p><strong>Could you tell us about the crucial week when you had to choose between law and journalism?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Sure. With my Oxford law degree, I really couldn’t do much of anything. To practice law or be an academic in the U.S., I would have needed to get at least one more year of law school and pass the bar exam in the U.S. I couldn’t even take the bar exam in most states, other than Nevada, without one more year of law school. So I applied to a one-year program at Harvard Law School and was accepted. I think I got the acceptance in the beginning of May. That was the route that I would take if I wanted to be a law professor.</p> <p>I had been doing a lot of traveling, had traveled through the Middle East, and in particular had gone — this was 1982 — had gone to a town called Hamah, in Syria, where about 30,000 people had been wiped out as part of a suppressed insurrection. The center of the town had been completely destroyed. It was rubble, this big, huge, vast area of rubble. And I found some survivors who wanted to tell their story. I couldn’t speak any Arabic, they couldn’t speak any English or any French, so we couldn’t communicate. That experience really made me think that if I wanted to become a journalist, that one of the key skills that would help in that career would be Arabic language, ’cause so few journalists speak it, yet a lot of things happen in the Arabic-speaking world. And so I had applied to study Arabic in Cairo, at the American University in Cairo, and the same week that program came through — my acceptance there came through and Harvard Law School came through. The Cairo program would essentially take me toward a career in journalism, I thought, and the Harvard Law School to a career maybe as a law professor. So I thought about it, agonized about it, and then decided that Cairo sounded like a lot more fun.</p> <p><strong>How did you come to work for <em>The New York Times</em>?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: After studying in Egypt, then I thought I was going to be hired by <em>The Washington Post</em> and that had been the expectation. Then <em>The Washington Post</em> was going through some internal upheavals and there was a bit of a turf battle, and so they didn’t hire me. They didn’t really make a decision one way or the other, and in desperation I went and interviewed at <em>The New York Times</em>, and the business editor was an Anglophile, and since I’d just recently been at Oxford, I managed to have a job interview. It was all about Britain, and fortunately didn’t touch on business at all, which I had zero knowledge of. I could never have told him the difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank. But fortunately, he never managed to figure out my ignorance in all these subjects, or frankly, a lack of interest in a lot of it.</p> <p><strong>You kept the conversation going about Oxford.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I pushed every Anglo button I could, and we never actually got to the meat of the interview before his next meeting. So he decided then to hire me. Then various other editors at the <em>Times</em> assumed that he had vetted me about business and economics, so they didn’t vet me on those particulars. So then I was hired. I remember in one of my first articles I had to do something about an investment bank, and I remember going up and asking someone “What exactly is an investment bank?” and the person was horrified. “Who have we hired?” But at that point, fortunately, I was already on the payroll.</p> <p><strong>How did you finally get off the business desk?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I was assigned various stories in which editors desperately tried to train me in business. I remember at one point, one of the editors wanted me to do a corporate profile of Harley-Davidson. Here’s this nitty-gritty company, talk to everybody. Then, I remember, the people I interviewed about it included the Hell’s Angels, and the editors were I think half amused and half horrified that the Hell’s Angels were being reported in a <em>New York Times</em> business profile. So they partly gave up on me, and then partly, they were looking for a reporter to send to Hong Kong. And I was well prepared to become a correspondent in, say, West Africa or in the Arab world. I was totally unprepared to go to East Asia, and this being a classic bureaucracy, that’s where they sent me. To Hong Kong, initially.</p> <p><strong>Did you go to Hong Kong to cover business?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Initially, my mandate was to cover half business and then half international affairs. I did that for a year, and then they decided they didn’t really like their Beijing bureau chief, and I had filled in for him at one point and had acquitted myself honorably. I was in the neighborhood, so they sent me on to Beijing.</p> <p><strong>Had you already met your wife at that time?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Yeah. The move to Hong Kong was extraordinary, because my wife, Sheryl, and I had been going out in Los Angeles. But one of the impediments in our relationship was that I was interested in going off to Africa or the Arab world, and that seemed to be where the <em>Times</em> was pushing me toward, and she is Chinese-American and wanted to go out to Asia, and was planning to go out to Hong Kong the following summer.</p> <p><strong>She was also a journalist?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Yeah. She was working for <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> in Los Angeles, I was working for <em>The New York Times</em> in Los Angeles, both covering business, so we couldn’t talk about anything that either of us was doing, which made for a complicated romance. So we went out for the summer, and we thought we would each be heading toward different continents. And then a few weeks later, lo and behold, the <em>Times</em> decides to send me out to Hong Kong. So that rescued our romance and it became much more serious after that. Then we married when we were just on our way to Beijing together, and then she began working for <em>The New York Times</em> as well, so we were <em>The New York Times</em> couple.</p> <p><strong>That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: It is very unusual. There were some people who thought it wasn’t an ideal arrangement, that if you have the most populous country in the world, should it really be covered, for the most important newspaper in the world, by two people who share pillow talk? There is a real question about that. On the other hand, I think we frankly did a pretty good job, and I think we complemented each other pretty well. It also helped, frankly, having a Caucasian and an ethnic Chinese. There were a lot of times when it helped tremendously that she looked local and could get by. It was much harder to follow her than to follow me, for example.</p> <p><strong>You had already covered the same beat together, even though you weren’t supposed to talk about it.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Right. It made it much easier, when she came to <em>The New York Times</em>, that we could actually talk about what we were doing!</p> <p><strong>When were you actually editing the Sunday <em>Times</em>?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: That was later. Most of my career I was a reporter, and there were various times when editors tried to make me an editor and I always resisted. And finally the executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, made me an offer that was too good to pass up. That was to be the editor of the Sunday <em>New York Times</em>. And so in 2000 — end of 2000 — he gave me that job. It was an extraordinary position, to have the responsibility for the premier front page in American journalism.</p> <p><strong>How long did you have that position?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I did that for about a year. I was a beneficiary of 9/11, in some sense. I had always wanted a column, but part of the problem was my main interest and expertise was international affairs and we had an international affairs columnist, Tom Friedman. And so unless Tom got hit by a meteorite, I didn’t really see how I might get a column-writing gig. But suddenly, after 9/11, international affairs were so important that our publisher felt that we needed another columnist who had that specialty. So lo and behold, I got that job.</p> <p><strong>When did you first become aware of the situation in Darfur?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: At the beginning of 2004, I’d heard a lot about refugees being driven out of their homes in Darfur. They were arriving in Chad, and I didn’t really know whether to believe it. A lot of things in the aid world tend to get exaggerated. But I had another story that I wanted to do in Chad anyway, so I thought, well, I’ll go there and check it out. And I got to the border of Chad and Sudan, the Darfur area, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I just couldn’t believe it. In particular, there were a lot of people who had been driven out of their villages and were hiding, and I was able to find them and talk to them. They were hiding from the Janjaweed militia, the Sudanese-sponsored militia. And in this area, it’s very arid, so there’s not much water, and there are wells that are quite infrequent. These families, of course, had to get water, and if men went to the wells, then the Janjaweed would shoot them. If women went to the wells, the Janjaweed would rape them. And what these families were doing was they would take their little kids, their nine- and ten-year-old kids, with a couple of donkeys, and send them several miles through the desert to the wells to load up with water, because the Janjaweed in general would leave the kids alone. But watching these families, in utter agony as they would send their little kids across the desert to the wells, wondering if those kids were going to be okay, left an unbelievable impression on me. Partly because my kids were at a similar age, and I was thinking I couldn’t imagine sending my kids into that kind of danger. And yet if you didn’t, then the whole family would die. That image really haunted me and led me to go again and again.</p> <p><strong>How soon did it become clear what was happening in the big picture?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: It became pretty clear quite quickly. On my next trip I think was the moment I realized the scale of what was going on. I arrived at a place hundreds of miles from that first trip on the Chad-Sudan border. It was an oasis, and so there was water. And there were 30,000 people who had been driven out of their homes and were sheltered at this oasis, getting no help from anybody. And they were just sitting under trees, in the shade, sort of one family per tree. And I did what a reporter does, I went from tree to tree. The first tree, I met a man who’d been shot in the neck and in the jaw, and had been carried by his brother for 49 days to get to that oasis. Next tree, right next to that, there were two little kids whose parents and siblings had been killed. They were left alone. Under the next tree there was a family, the men had all been slaughtered in that family, the parents thrown in the village well to poison the water. Under the last tree, a woman who’d been gang-raped by the Janjaweed for a week, and then scarred to stigmatize her forever as a rape victim. And what really got to me was these were four trees right next to each other, and as far as I could see in every direction, there were more trees and more people under them with stories just like that. And it was really at that moment that both the brutality of the atrocities and the scale of the atrocities sank home to me. If you had told me then that Darfur would now be a household word, I would have been astonished. But if you had told me that Darfur would now be a household word, the President would have called it a genocide, and yet we would still essentially be allowing it to continue, I would have been even more astonished and depressed.</p> <p><strong>Seeing that terribly brutal side of human beings, isn’t it devastating to see human beings treated that way?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: When you go into Darfur or Eastern Congo or any of these places, you see the very worst of humanity. But side by side with it, you see the very best of humanity. You see these unbelievable aid workers who are risking their lives to save other people. You see local people who are, again, risking their own lives to save other people. There’s one woman who deeply impressed me, a woman called Souad, who had — just shortly before I got there, she’d been out with her younger sister, collecting firewood outside a camp called Goz Amir, and the Janjaweed had come, and she told her sister, “Run back to camp.” And then she made a diversion of herself, and ran very ostentatiously in the other direction so the Janjaweed would see her. And they did. Eight of them gang-raped her, beat her up very badly, but she saved her younger sister. You see that kind of courage, and that of the doctors, and you come back from a trip maybe feeling perhaps even modestly reassured about the goodness of humanity, as much as you may be despairing about the depths to which humans can sink.</p> <p><strong>It must be maddening for you to watch network newscasts, night after night, never mentioning Darfur, or mentioning it for a sentence, in passing.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: The thing that is most frustrating is these runaway bride stories. Some white woman runs away from her wedding, and instantly — coverage all over. Meanwhile, you have hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur dying, and they don’t get any attention. It’s a difficult story to get. It’s hard. It’s dangerous. There are a lot of reasons why we in the news business don’t do a good job with it. But if I remember right, I think 2004 was the year of the Michael Jackson trial. If I have my numbers right, CBS that year covered Darfur for a total — in an evening newscast — of three minutes over the entire year. And also spent 28 minutes covering the Michael Jackson trial. You just wish that if the Michael Jackson trial had had a change of venue to Darfur, you just knew that the networks would have figured out how to cover it, would have been able to get over those impediments. At the end of the day, I think the problem was that we — the networks — just didn’t think that it was news that a bunch of Africans were being butchered.</p> <p><strong>Editors say, “People don’t want to hear that.” It’s not that they don’t care, but they care more about ratings.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I think there’s something to that, but I think that we can also be a lot more creative in the way we cover these kinds of stories. There’s been some very interesting work by social psychologists about what builds a connection.</p> <p>It’s clear, for example, that readers or viewers don’t care about a lot of people being killed. But they can be made to care about <em>one</em> person being killed. So I think the challenge for us is not to write about this huge tapestry of death and destruction, but to write about the Anne Frank out there, the finite story. And I think that can be done. And I think that if we, as journalists, think that we perform some kind of special function in society, if we go into journalism feeling that we want to make a difference, if we want to have special privileges, such as a legal privilege to protect our sources, then it’s also incumbent upon us to serve that public purpose. I think that as long as we turn the other way from the genocide going on, that it’s hard to argue that we’re doing our job.</p> <p><strong>Why hasn’t the U.S. done more about Darfur?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: This is actually fitting perfectly into the historical trajectory, that whenever there has been a genocide happening, we have not taken action. This surprise is not that we’re not acting, the surprise would be if we actually did do something. We’re doing the same thing we did in Rwanda, Cambodia, all the way back to the Armenian genocide.</p> <p><strong>The Holocaust, too.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: The Holocaust as well, of course. I think the broader challenge is that secretaries of state and national security advisers are pretty good about looking after our national interests. If there is a threat to our national interest, you can count on them to think creatively about the challenge. Where our national values are challenged, whether it be genocide or whether it be any kind of other humanitarian challenge, then the system doesn’t work. If there is going to be a response, it has to come from ordinary citizens putting pressure on the government. I think that there is a common thread between genocide, malaria, AIDS, all these other issues, and that the leadership, moral leadership, is going to come from ordinary citizens if it’s going to come at all. It can be students. It can be churches, synagogues, all kinds of civic organizations. But they’re the ones who provide leadership on each of these issues.</p> <p>I must say, there are some times when I find it incredibly depressing that there hasn’t been more of a response. But the other side of the coin is that you think about hundreds of thousands of students across the country who have participated in some way, or who have worn a green wrist band, or have gone to a march or done something. That is really an extraordinary response of a bunch of kids for a bunch of people of a different skin color, different religion, in a region that they’d never heard of a few years ago. And it has indeed made a difference. There are hundreds of thousands of people who have died in Darfur, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive today who wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been for that kind of response. And it is worth celebrating, that moral leadership on the part of students, at the same time that we lament the lack of leadership from the White House and Congress and the news media itself.</p> <p><strong>You mentioned Cambodia earlier. You bought the freedom of two young girls in Cambodia. Can you tell us about that?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Sex trafficking had been an issue that had bothered me a lot. When, in 2004, I decided to buy two girls from their brothels, there was a lot of debate in the journalistic community. Is this really appropriate to jump into the arena, to do this? The backdrop for that, which maybe I should have talked about more, was that earlier, I think in 1996, I had gone to Cambodia to write an article, and had spent one long afternoon in a brothel with two girls, a 14-year-old, a 15-year-old. The 15-year-old, in particular, moved me, because her mother had just tracked her down the previous week. Had found her there in the brothel, had wanted to take her home, but the brothel owner said, “I paid good money for this girl. You’re going to have to buy her back from me.” I remember leaving the brothel afterward, knowing that I had this great front-page story, and these two girls were going to stay behind and die of AIDS, and they were slaves, every bit as much as 19th century slaves had been.</p> <p><strong>The mother didn’t have the money?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: The mother did not have the money to buy her daughter back. And the brothel owner paid good bribes to the police, they weren’t going to help the mother. And that was how the system worked. I went to another town, a little village called Svay Pak, where there were little girls who were being sold as virgins to anybody who’d want to buy them. That really gnawed at me.</p> <p>I felt kind of exploitative of these two girls, because I had gone in and gotten this great front page story, and they were going to stay and die of AIDS. And when I went back in 2004 to write about it, I didn’t really want the same thing to happen again. So that was why I was searching for some other answer, and ended up buying them. I got receipts from the brothel, which is an extraordinary thing. You get written receipts for buying a girl. I took them back to their villages and an American group called American Assistance for Cambodia tried to set them up to start small businesses.</p> <figure id="attachment_10642" style="width: 2000px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10642 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10642 size-full lazyload" alt="Young Cambodian women, forced into prostitution, have organized to improve their lives. Many of these women were sold to brothels as children and will die of AIDS before they reach their 20s. Nicholas Kristof's columns have helped focus the world's attention on the shameful traffic in human beings. (AP Images/David Longstreath)" width="2000" height="1267" data-sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077.jpg 2000w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077-380x241.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077-760x481.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Young Cambodian women, forced into prostitution, have organized to improve their lives. Many of these women were sold to brothels as children and will die of AIDS before they reach their 20s. Nicholas Kristof’s columns have helped focus the world’s attention on the shameful traffic in human beings. (AP Images/David Longstreath)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>And one of them had a successful outcome?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Yes. One of them then, things worked out very well for her. The other one, a few days later, ended up going back to the brothel. She had a methamphetamine addiction and she was getting meth from the brothel, possibly as a deliberate way of creating a dependence. She desperately wanted to start over, but she could not, she just could not break that addiction. She needed that meth, so she went back to the brothel. I’ve met them both many times since then, and she still talks about trying to get away, trying to start over, but she’s not going to be able to.</p> <p><strong>How much did they cost, these girls?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: One girl cost $150 and the other $203.</p> <p><strong>Can you tell us about your current project? You’re writing about women in developing countries.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: My wife and I, in covering the world, increasingly we came to see that one of the real central moral challenges was the status of women in the developing world. I think part of that was covering Tiananmen. We don’t know how many people died in Tiananmen, but maybe it was 400, 500, 600, something in that order of magnitude. And then we realized that every year in China there were, if I remember right, about 30,000 baby girls, just in the first year of life, infants, who die because they don’t get the same nutrition and healthcare as boys do. Thirty thousand extra girls who die. There are hundreds of thousands of women in China who are <em>guaimai</em> — sold — that can be the wives of peasants. Those kinds of institutional challenges never get attention. A woman dies in childbirth somewhere in the world, mostly in very poor countries, once a minute. That never gets attention. And so at one level we came to believe that the central moral challenge for this century — equivalent to slavery in the 19th or the totalitarianism in the 20th — is to address the gender inequity in the developing world. But secondly, as a purely practical matter, if you want to address poverty in the third world, you have to do that by educating girls and giving them a role in the economy. Part of that is that a country can’t develop on one leg. It can’t develop with half of its population. The other part of it has to do with the dirty little secret of development, something that isn’t talked about a lot.</p> <p>One reason why people are poor is not just they have low income, but that they spend money badly. If you look at the poorest families in the world, people who have incomes of less than about a dollar a day per capita, then they spend about 20 percent of those incomes on a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, extravagant festivals and prostitution. Twenty percent goes to that. About two percent goes to educating their children, which is actually a good investment. It actually has a positive net return. The reason is essentially that men tend to control the purse strings. And there is rich literature showing that if you give women more control over those purse strings, more decision-making authority, then more money goes to educating children and to starting small businesses, and more for savings. So we have to figure out, if we want to address poverty, how to allocate that money more efficiently. How to get women into the economy. And that has to do with — “empowerment” is kind of a buzz word, and a bit jargony — but it has to do with that issue of empowering women. So that is our big focus for the moment. The book will come out in early 2009 from Knopf.</p> <p><strong>Will it center on China?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: No, it won’t. It will center on Africa and South Asia. China, to us, strikes us as a model, in fact, of the opposite: a country that has figured out how to use women effectively.</p> <p>A hundred years ago, China was one of the worst places in the world to be born female. You had foot binding, you had child marriage, you had concubinage, you had a million constraints. Girls often didn’t even get names, given names, just called “third daughter.” These days, China educates girls. It gives them the autonomy to go and work in the factories. And indeed, the Chinese economic revolution over the last 20 years was very much the result of taking these village girls, who weren’t contributing to the economy, letting them go to the coastal factories, and suddenly you have this economic explosion as a result. Then the girls in those factories, they tended to delay marriage, delay child-bearing, they reduced fertility, which added a demographic dividend as well, and then they tended to use that money more effectively. So that is the process that we need to see replicated in other countries as well.</p> <p><strong>Could you tell us about your family background? Where were your parents from?</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>What did your parents teach?</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>Did they expect you to take school seriously?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Yeah. I would say, though, that 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.</p> <p><strong>What kind of books did you like to read when you were young? Do any stand out in your memory?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Don’t tell anybody, but I was a huge <em>Freddy the Pig</em> 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.</p> <p><strong>How about when you got older? Fiction? Nonfiction?</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>Did you have siblings?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: No. I’m a loner.</p> <p><strong>What was Yamhill like?</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>How do professors run a farm?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Kind of badly. 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.</p> <p><strong>You once described yourself as a country hick who thought it would be amusing to go to Harvard. How did that come about?</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>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.</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>What activities were you involved in at Harvard? We know you worked for the daily paper, <em>The Crimson</em>. Was that hard to balance with your studies?</strong></p> <p>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 <em>The Crimson</em>. 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 <em>The Crimson</em>, 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 <em>The Crimson</em>. I think that was probably the right decision.</p> <p><strong>Some of your fellow writers recall that you would help out with galley proofing, pulling all-nighters to get the paper out.</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>The fact that you traveled to Syria while you were studying at Oxford is unusual for Americans of your generation. You must have already had a lot of curiosity about the Third World.</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I have a lot of wanderlust. I had found, really when I was at Oxford, just the excitement of entering different worlds, different cultures. On my first vacation from Oxford, that’s when I got stuck behind martial law in Poland, and then at the end of that trip I went to Morocco. I remember waking up in the morning and hearing the call of the muezzin from the mosque, the call to prayer, and just feeling it was really a different civilization, being really excited by that. So I tended to do a lot of traveling from Oxford, and I found it in many ways a better learning experience than anything that I had done in the classroom. And that was one of the — again — the attractions of journalism. The sense that if you want to learn about the world, that one of the best ways to do that is journalism, rather than through the academic route.</p> <p><strong>When did your bout with malaria occur?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: There was one trip I made to Congo in 1997 to cover the civil war there. The UN had agreed to fly in a bunch of reporters. They didn’t want to use one of their own planes, because it was a war zone, but they found a private plane and a Texan pilot, a wild and crazy Texan who had been flying drugs in from Colombia into the U.S. at a hundred feet above sea level. And finally that got too hot for him, so he relocated to Africa to fly into war zones for anybody who would pay him. And we ended up crashing. We ended up being in a plane crash flying into the Congo and that was scary, because we knew, we had about 20 minutes when we were losing control of the plane, lost hydraulics. You couldn’t dump fuel, because you dump fuel with the hydraulics. Finally we crash landed. I was okay. But then I thought, well, maybe when I leave the Congo, I’m not sure I want to fly with some crazy pilot again. I looked at the map and there was a road going out that had recently been repaired by one of the rebel armies to go in. So I went, I know, I’ll drive out. So I hired a vehicle. We tried to drive out that way. This road was just in the middle of nowhere. No nothing. Three wars going on. Three different rebel armies fighting their way along this at various times. And then I was chased by one of these rebel groups for a week, trying to leave on that road.</p> <p><strong>A week?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: For a week. They had one vehicle and they chased us, and we had a slightly better vehicle, so we managed to stay ahead. In the course of that I got malaria. It was a quite adventurous three-week period in the Congo.</p> <p><strong>How were you treated for malaria? Did you have to stay there?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Actually, I had just returned to Tokyo where I was based. Then in the evening I felt the classic symptoms of malaria. Since I’d just come from the Congo, I knew that I was coming down with malaria.</p> <p><strong>What are the classic symptoms?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: A fever, cold sweats, and kind of aches. And given the circumstances, I knew that it must be malaria. So I called up our Tokyo office manager and asked, I said, “I think I’m just coming down with malaria, can you just try to check around what hospital in Tokyo might be able to treat malaria?” And he said he would do that. Well, half an hour later I hear these sirens in the distance, and they come closer and closer, and I see them stopping at my building. A little bit later there’s a pounding on the door, and these guys in these bio-hazard suits come up, and they say, “Is this where the person with the tropical disease is?” The thing had gotten a little exaggerated, so they took me off to a hospital that evening. But the person there at night had no idea how to treat malaria, and they sort of looked at me and decided I probably wasn’t going to die overnight and told me to come back the next morning. By that point the bio-hazard guys had disappeared, so I had to walk home. It was a wild time.</p> <p><strong>How do you treat malaria?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Actually, malaria isn’t so bad, because the ratio of sympathy to suffering is pretty good as diseases go. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s not particularly to be feared as long as you’ve got the money for the medicine.</p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: If you’re wealthy, then you have a little pill, Larium or Methoquin, and you take that, and normally you get better pretty quickly. That’s what happened with me. I was hospitalized for about a week and I was okay. The problem is that if you’re anemic and your defenses are depleted, and you can’t afford $10 worth of medicine, as happens in much of the world, then you die.</p> <p><strong>Is it contagious?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: It’s not contagious at all. It’s transferable only by a mosquito biting you, and then biting somebody else.</p> <p><strong>You’ve visited all of the countries in what President Bush called the “Axis of Evil.” What was that like?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I think I’m one of the few Americans to visit each of the “Axis of Evil” countries multiple times. I visited North Korea in 1989 and maybe 2005. I visited Iraq, under Saddam, and then during the war itself, and since then. And then Iran I visited in 2001 and then in maybe 2005.</p> <p><strong>So are they as evil as all that?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I’d have to say they really are. They’re each evil in their own way. North Korea, I would have to say, is a world apart from any others. Saddam’s Iraq, or Iran today, feel like the free world compared to North Korea. There’s no country, I don’t think, in history that has ever been like it, because it marries complete totalitarianism with modern technology. For example, you go to any home and there’s a speaker on the wall, and the speaker wakes you up in the morning with a patriotic word of what’s happening, and it puts you to bed at night. It completely controls you. Radios in North Korea, they don’t have a dial that you tune, they have pre-set stations. You can listen to this station or that station or that one, but you can’t tune it yourself. Everything is just completely and utterly controlled in a way that I have never seen remotely in any other country.</p> <figure id="attachment_10640" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-10640 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-10640 size-full lazyload" alt="New York Times columnist and correspondent Nicholas Kristof recounts his global adventures at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii. " width="2280" height="1520" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634.jpg 2280w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181007212605im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181007212605/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text"><em>New York Times</em> columnist and correspondent Nicholas Kristof recounts his global adventures at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii.</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Could you tell us what the American Dream means to you?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: I think it means two things to me. A combination of upward mobility through education — and I think that’s one reason why we have to do much, much better in improving the education system. I think we need to disaggregate it a little bit. In general, we talk about the American education system as a whole. The reality is that white suburban schools do a pretty good job of educating their kids. It’s the inner city schools that are a disaster. We in America should be absolutely ashamed, with all the riches we have around us, that we can’t bridge that gap and apply the necessary resources so that a child of color growing up in urban Chicago can get a better education. The second part of that, I think, is empathy. It’s so important that kids growing up, and that all society, has some empathy for those who are less advantaged. It’s often hard to figure out how to address these problems, including education. But you can’t begin to address those problems unless you have some empathy for those who are less advantaged. I think with that combination of education and empathy we can hugely progress in quality of life all across the country.</p> <p><strong>You’ve had such a colorful and effective career so far, and you’re still young. What would you tell a young person interested in journalism? What kind of advice would you give them?</strong></p> <p>Nicholas Kristof: Journalism has a very uncertain future right now. We need a business model. We know how to practice journalism, we don’t know how to make money doing it. I’ve had such a wonderful time. I’ve learned so much doing this. It’s a way you really can make a difference. I would encourage people to figure out nontraditional ways of practicing journalism — video, sound. I’d also encourage them, if they go into it, not just to stir the pot, writing about “he said this” and “she said that” and of politics as a horse race. The real power of journalism isn’t in just interviewing famous people and writing about it. It’s in the spotlight that we have, in the shaping the agenda. The power that I think we should do more with is to highlight issues, illuminate the things that aren’t getting the attention they need. That would be my advice.</p> <p><strong>Thank you for spending this time with us today.</strong></p> <p>You’re welcome.</p></body></html> </div>  </aside>  <div class="read-more__toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#full-interview"><a href="#" class="sans-4 btn">Read full interview</a></div> </article> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="gallery" role="tabpanel"> <section class="isotope-wrapper">  <header class="toolbar toolbar--gallery bg-white clearfix"> <div class="col-md-6"> <div class="serif-4">Nicholas D. Kristof Gallery</div> </div> <div class="col-md-6 text-md-right isotope-toolbar"> <ul class="list-unstyled list-inline m-b-0 text-brand-primary sans-4"> <li class="list-inline-item" data-filter=".photo"><i class="icon-icon_camera"></i>24 photos</li> </ul> </div> </header> <div class="isotope-gallery isotope-box single-achiever__gallery clearfix"> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802.jpg" data-image-caption="The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, enjoys a lighter moment with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and journalist Nicholas Kristof during the International Achievement Summit. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-003-2008konasummit0802" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-003-2008konasummit0802-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.59473684210526" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-004-b-kristof-2008konasummit0796.jpg" data-image-caption="Sam Donaldson conducts a panel discussion with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Desmond Tutu and Nicholas Kristof. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-004-b-kristof-2008konasummit0796" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-004-b-kristof-2008konasummit0796-380x226.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-004-b-kristof-2008konasummit0796-760x452.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-008-kristof-2008konasummit0830.jpg" data-image-caption="Nicholas Kristof joins President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Archbishop Desmond Tutu for an informal panel discussion at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement) " data-image-copyright="kri0-008-kristof-2008konasummit0830" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-008-kristof-2008konasummit0830-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-008-kristof-2008konasummit0830-507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.52" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236.jpg" data-image-caption="The 1989 democracy movement comes to a violent end. Student demonstrators carry a blood-soaked victim to safety as the Chinese army drives the demonstrators from Tiananmen Square. (漏 David Turnley/CORBIS)" data-image-copyright="Carrying a Seriously Wounded Protester" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236-250x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-015-Kristof_Nicholas_Corbis_TL001236-500x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.64342105263158" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371.jpg" data-image-caption="Nicholas Kristof receives the Golden Plate Award from General Wesley Clark at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371-380x244.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-021-kristof2008konasummit1371-760x489.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66315789473684" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-020-kristof2008konasummit1292.jpg" data-image-caption="Academy of Achievement Class of 2008, Kona-Kailua, Hawaii." data-image-copyright="kri0-020-kristof2008konasummit1292" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-020-kristof2008konasummit1292-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-020-kristof2008konasummit1292-760x504.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-019-kristof2008konasummit0881.jpg" data-image-caption="NIcholas Kristof talks to Academy student delegates at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-019-kristof2008konasummit0881" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-019-kristof2008konasummit0881-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-019-kristof2008konasummit0881-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-018-kristof2008konasummit0762.jpg" data-image-caption="Maggie Daley, Sam Donaldson, Catherine Reynolds, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Nicholas Kristof at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-018-kristof2008konasummit0762" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-018-kristof2008konasummit0762-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-018-kristof2008konasummit0762-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.2773109243697" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-017-kristof.jpg" data-image-caption="Nicholas Kristof (Courtesy of Nicholas Kristof)" data-image-copyright="Nicholas Kristof (Courtesy of Nicholas Kristof)" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-017-kristof-298x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-017-kristof-595x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-016-kristof-Nicholas_D._Kristof_-_Davos_2010.jpg" data-image-caption="January 30, 2010: Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times during the session "Redesign Your Cause" at the 2010 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Monika Flueckiger)" data-image-copyright="Redesign Your Cause: Nicholas D. Kristof" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-016-kristof-Nicholas_D._Kristof_-_Davos_2010-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-016-kristof-Nicholas_D._Kristof_-_Davos_2010-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.5261044176707" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-014-kristof-AP890530058.jpg" data-image-caption="Chinese students erect a "Goddess of Democracy" statue, modeled on the Statue of Liberty, in the face of Chairman Mao's portrait on Tiananmen Square. Thousands of students camped on the square in the heart of Beijing in 1989 to call for democratic reform. (AP Images/Jeff Widener)" data-image-copyright="TIANANMEN SQUARE" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-014-kristof-AP890530058-249x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-014-kristof-AP890530058-498x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.65" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933.jpg" data-image-caption="Soldiers loyal to General Laurent Kabila enter Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1997. Nicholas Kristof was detained by Kabila's forces in the midst of their revolt against President Mobutu Sese Seko. (Corinne Dufka 漏 Reuters/CORBIS)" data-image-copyright="FILE PHOTO OF THE THEN REBEL SOLDIERS OUTSIDE PRESIDENCY IN KINSHASA" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933-380x247.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-013-kristof-UT0060933-760x494.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.63289473684211" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077.jpg" data-image-caption="Young Cambodian women, forced into prostitution, have organized to improve their lives. Many of these women were sold to brothels as children and will die of AIDS before they reach their 20s. Nicholas Kristof's columns have helped focus the world's attention on the shameful trafficking of human beings. (AP Images/David Longstreath)" data-image-copyright="CAMBODIAN PROSTITUTES" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077-380x241.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-012-kristof-AP050605077-760x481.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.625" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299.jpg" data-image-caption="Refugees from the violence in Darfur dig for water in the arid soil of a makeshift refugee camp in Sudan. Nicholas Kristof received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his reporting that focused on the genocide in Darfur and gave a voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world. (AP Images/Ben Curtis)" data-image-copyright="SUDAN" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299-380x237.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-011-kristof-AP040927017299-760x475.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634.jpg" data-image-caption="New York Times columnist and correspondent Nicholas Kristof recounts his global adventures at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-009-kristof-2008konasummit0634-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-007-kristof-2008konasummit0828_1.jpg" data-image-caption="Archbishop Desmond Tutu listens as Nicholas Kristof makes a point during a panel discussion of challenges facing Africa, during the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement). " data-image-copyright="kri0-007-kristof-2008konasummit0828_1" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-007-kristof-2008konasummit0828_1-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-007-kristof-2008konasummit0828_1-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-006-kristof-2008konasummit0799.jpg" data-image-caption="Desmond Tutu shares a joke with Nicholas Kristof as Sam Donaldson and President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia look on, during the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement). " data-image-copyright="kri0-006-kristof-2008konasummit0799" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-006-kristof-2008konasummit0799-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-006-kristof-2008konasummit0799-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-005-kristof-2008konasummit0797.jpg" data-image-caption="Desmond Tutu shares a joke with Nicholas Kristof as Sam Donaldson and President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia look on, during the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement). " data-image-copyright="kri0-005-kristof-2008konasummit0797" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-005-kristof-2008konasummit0797-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-005-kristof-2008konasummit0797-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-002-kristof-2008konasummit0626.jpg" data-image-caption="New York Times columnist and correspondent Nicholas Kristof recounts his global adventures at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii. (漏 Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="kri0-002-kristof-2008konasummit0626" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-002-kristof-2008konasummit0626-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-002-kristof-2008konasummit0626-507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4990138067061" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo-.jpg" data-image-caption="Nicholas Kristof, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and Distinguished Commentary. (Courtesy of Nicholas Kristof)" data-image-copyright="kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo-" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo--253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kri0-001-kristof-Nicholas-Kristof-photo--507x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-Achiever-Profile-Square-760.jpg" data-image-caption="Nicholas Kristof (Courtesy of Nicholas Kristof)" data-image-copyright="kristof-Achiever-Profile-Square-760" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-Achiever-Profile-Square-760-380x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kristof-Achiever-Profile-Square-760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.5230460921844" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140.jpg" data-image-caption="Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, attend the AOL BUILD Speaker Series at AOL Studios in New York City on February 9, 2015. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="AOL BUILD Speaker Series: Nicholas Kristof" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140-250x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-463092140-499x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.67368421052632" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237.jpg" data-image-caption="Chinese military and demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. (Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Chinese Military and Demonstrators" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237-380x256.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-kristof-GettyImages-640489237-760x512.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4814814814815" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019.jpg" data-image-caption="Goddess of Democracy at sunset during the protests at Tiananmen Square. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019-257x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WP-2-kristof-GettyImages-640485019-513x760.jpg"></div>  </figure>    </div> </section> </div> </div> <div class="container"> <footer class="editorial-article__footer col-md-8 col-md-offset-4"> <div class="editorial-article__next-link sans-3"> <a href="#"><strong>What's next:</strong> <span class="editorial-article__next-link-title">profile</span></a> </div> <ul class="social list-unstyled list-inline ssk-group m-b-0"> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-facebook" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared Achiever on Facebook"><i class="icon-icon_facebook-circle"></i></a></li> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-twitter" data-gtm-category="social" 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sans-6">Pulitzer Prize for History</div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="text-white achiever-block__text--bottom"> <div class="achiever-block__year sans-4">Inducted in <span class="year-inducted">1996</span></div> </div> </figcaption> </figure> </a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="centered-blocks"> <div class="isotope-achiever the-arts public-service ambitious curious resourceful write " data-year-inducted="1985" data-achiever-name="McCullough"> <div class="achiever-block view-grid"> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-mccullough/"> <figure class="ratio-container ratio-container--square bg-black"> <div class="lazyload box achiever-block__image" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/mccullough_760_ac-190x190.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/mccullough_760_ac-380x380.jpg"></div> <div class="achiever-block__overlay"></div> <figcaption class="text-xs-center achiever-block__text"> <div class="display--table"> <div 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class="find-achiever" id="find-achiever-list"> <div class="form-group"> <input id="find-achiever-input" class="search js-focus" placeholder="Search for an achiever"/> <i class="icon-icon_chevron-down"></i> </div> <ul class="find-achiever-list list m-b-0 list-unstyled"> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/hank-aaron/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Hank Aaron</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/kareem-abdul-jabbar/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lynsey-addario/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lynsey Addario</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/edward-albee/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Edward Albee</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tenley-albright-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Tenley Albright, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/julie-andrews/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Julie Andrews</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/maya-angelou/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Maya Angelou</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-d-ballard-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert D. Ballard, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-roger-bannister-2/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Roger Bannister</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-banville/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Banville</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ehud-barak/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ehud Barak</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lee-r-berger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lee R. Berger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-timothy-berners-lee/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Tim Berners-Lee</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/yogi-berra/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Yogi Berra</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jeffrey-p-bezos/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jeffrey P. Bezos</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/benazir-bhutto/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Benazir Bhutto</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/simone-biles/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Simone Biles</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/keith-l-black/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Keith L. Black, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/elizabeth-blackburn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-boies-2/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David Boies</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/norman-e-borlaug/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Norman E. Borlaug, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/benjamin-c-bradlee/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Benjamin C. Bradlee</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sergey-brin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sergey Brin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carter-j-brown/"><span class="achiever-list-name">J. Carter Brown</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/linda-buck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Linda Buck, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carol-burnett/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carol Burnett</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-h-w-bush/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George H. W. Bush</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/susan-butcher/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Susan Butcher</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-cameron/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Cameron</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/benjamin-s-carson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Benjamin S. Carson, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-carter/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jimmy Carter</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/johnny-cash/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Johnny Cash</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/william-j-clinton/"><span class="achiever-list-name">William J. Clinton</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/francis-s-collins/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/denton-a-cooley/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Denton A. Cooley, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/francis-ford-coppola/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Francis Ford Coppola</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ray-dalio/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ray Dalio</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/olivia-de-havilland/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Olivia de Havilland</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/michael-e-debakey-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Michael E. DeBakey, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/michael-dell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Michael S. Dell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ron-dennis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ron Dennis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/joan-didion/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Joan Didion</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-herbert-donald-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David Herbert Donald, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-doubilet/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David Doubilet</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/rita-dove/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Rita Dove</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sylvia-earle/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sylvia Earle, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/elbaradei/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mohamed ElBaradei</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/gertrude-elion/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Gertrude B. Elion, M.Sc.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-j-ellison/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry J. Ellison</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nora-ephron/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nora Ephron</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/julius-erving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Julius Erving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tony-fadell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Tony Fadell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-farmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Farmer, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzanne-farrell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzanne Farrell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-field/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally Field</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-norman-foster/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Norman Foster</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/aretha-franklin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Aretha Franklin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/milton-friedman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Milton Friedman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-fuentes/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Fuentes</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/athol-fugard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Athol Fugard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernest-j-gaines/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernest J. Gaines</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/william-h-gates-iii/"><span class="achiever-list-name">William H. Gates III</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-gehry/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank O. Gehry</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/murray-gell-mann-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-ghosn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Ghosn</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/vince-gill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Vince Gill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ruth-bader-ginsburg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louise-gluck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louise Gl眉ck</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/whoopi-goldberg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Whoopi Goldberg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jane-goodall/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Jane Goodall</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/doris-kearns-goodwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mikhail-s-gorbachev/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mikhail S. Gorbachev</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nadine-gordimer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nadine Gordimer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-jay-gould/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carol-greider-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carol Greider, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-grisham/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Grisham</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dorothy-hamill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dorothy Hamill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/demis-hassabis-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Demis Hassabis, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lauryn-hill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lauryn Hill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-edmund-hillary/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Edmund Hillary</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/reid-hoffman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Reid Hoffman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/khaled-hosseini/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Khaled Hosseini, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ron-howard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ron Howard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-hume/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Hume</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louis-ignarro-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louis Ignarro, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/daniel-inouye/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Daniel K. Inouye</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jeremy-irons/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jeremy Irons</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-irving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Irving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/kazuo-ishiguro/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Kazuo Ishiguro</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-peter-jackson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Peter Jackson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/donald-c-johanson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Donald C. Johanson, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-m-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank M. Johnson, Jr.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/philip-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Philip C. Johnson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/chuck-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Chuck Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-earl-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Earl Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/quincy-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Quincy Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/beverly-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Beverly Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dereck-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dereck Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-kagame/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Kagame</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/thomas-keller-2/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Thomas Keller</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-m-kennedy/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony M. Kennedy</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/b-b-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">B.B. King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carole-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carole King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/coretta-scott-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Coretta Scott King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-kissinger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry A. Kissinger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willem-j-kolff/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willem J. Kolff, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wendy-kopp/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wendy Kopp</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-r-kravis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry R. Kravis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nicholas D. Kristof</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mike-krzyzewski/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mike Krzyzewski</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ray-kurzwell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ray Kurzweil</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/eric-lander-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Eric S. Lander, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-s-langer-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert S. Langer, Sc.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-leakey/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard E. Leakey</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-lederman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Lederman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-lefkowitz-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/congressman-john-r-lewis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Congressman John R. Lewis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/maya-lin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Maya Lin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-lucas/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George Lucas</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/norman-mailer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Norman Mailer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peyton-manning/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peyton Manning</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wynton-marsalis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wynton Marsalis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-c-mather-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John C. Mather, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/johnny-mathis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Johnny Mathis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernst-mayr-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernst Mayr, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willie-mays/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willie Mays</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-mccourt/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank McCourt</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-mccullough/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David McCullough</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/audra-mcdonald/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Audra McDonald</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-william-h-mcraven/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral William H. McRaven, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/w-s-merwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">W. S. Merwin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-a-michener/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James A. Michener</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Marvin Minsky, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mario-j-molina-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mario J. Molina, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/n-scott-momaday-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/story-musgrave/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Story Musgrave, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ralph-nader/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ralph Nader</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peggy-noonan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peggy Noonan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jessye-norman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jessye Norman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tommy-norris/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lt. Thomas R. Norris, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/joyce-carol-oates/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Joyce Carol Oates</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pierre-omidyar/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pierre Omidyar</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jimmy Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/arnold-palmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Arnold Palmer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-panetta/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Panetta</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/rosa-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Rosa Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzan-lori-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzan-Lori Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/linus-pauling/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Linus C. Pauling, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/shimon-peres/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Shimon Peres</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/itzhak-perlman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Itzhak Perlman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-david-petraeus/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General David H. Petraeus, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sidney-poitier/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sidney Poitier</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-colin-l-powell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General Colin L. Powell, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/harold-prince/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Harold Prince</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/venki-ramakrishnan-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Venki Ramakrishnan, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-martin-rees/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Martin Rees</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lloyd-richards/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lloyd Richards</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-ride-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally K. Ride, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sonny-rollins/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sonny Rollins</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-romero/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony Romero</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-rosenquist/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Rosenquist</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pete-rozelle/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pete Rozelle</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/bill-russell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Bill Russell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/albie-sachs/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Albie Sachs</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/oliver-sacks-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Oliver Sacks, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jonas-salk-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jonas Salk, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frederick-sanger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frederick Sanger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-b-schaller-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George B. Schaller, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/barry-scheck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Barry Scheck</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-evans-schultes-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard Evans Schultes, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-h-norman-schwarzkopf/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-schwarzman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen A. Schwarzman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/glenn-t-seaborg-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Glenn T. Seaborg, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/neil-sheehan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Neil Sheehan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-alan-shepard-jr/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral Alan B. Shepard, Jr., USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ellen-johnson-sirleaf/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ellen Johnson Sirleaf</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-slim/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Slim Hel煤</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frederick-w-smith/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frederick W. Smith</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-sondheim/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Sondheim</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sonia-sotomayor/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sonia Sotomayor</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wole-soyinka/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wole Soyinka</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/esperanza-spalding/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Esperanza Spalding</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/martha-stewart/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Martha Stewart</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-james-b-stockdale/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral James B. Stockdale, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/hilary-swank/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Hilary Swank</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/amy-tan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Amy Tan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dame-kiri-te-kanawa/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Kiri Te Kanawa</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/edward-teller-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Edward Teller, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/twyla-tharp/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Twyla Tharp</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wayne-thiebaud/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wayne Thiebaud</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lt-michael-e-thornton-usn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lt. Michael E. Thornton, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/charles-h-townes-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Charles H. Townes, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-trimble/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David Trimble</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ted-turner/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert Edward (Ted) Turner</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/desmond-tutu/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Archbishop Desmond Tutu</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-updike/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Updike</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/gore-vidal/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Gore Vidal</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/antonio-villaraigosa/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Antonio Villaraigosa</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lech-walesa/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lech Walesa</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/herschel-walker/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Herschel Walker</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-d-watson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James D. Watson, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/andrew-weil-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Andrew Weil, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leslie-h-wexner/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leslie H. Wexner</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/elie-wiesel/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Elie Wiesel</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/edward-o-wilson-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Edward O. Wilson, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/oprah-winfrey/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Oprah Winfrey</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tom-wolfe/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Tom Wolfe</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-wooden/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Wooden</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/bob-woodward/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Bob Woodward</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/shinya-yamanaka-m-d-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Shinya Yamanaka, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-chuck-yeager/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General Chuck Yeager, USAF</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181007212605/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/andrew-young/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Andrew J. 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