dispatches

John Kifner /

John Kifner edited his Williams College paper and joined the New York Times as copy boy, the classic show-us-what-you-got entry level. Before long, he followed civil strife and Wounded Knee as a national correspondent. In 1979, he went for a short stint to help cover Iran’s Islamic revolution, and he stayed abroad as a star of the Times’ foreign staff.

Reporters who can be tough on their colleagues unanimously revere Kifner. With ingenuity, endless energy, and his fabled war bag always packed by the door, he moves at warp speed. An impish grin and persistence win over sources. A mastery of world realities underlies his work. He is a reporter’s reporter, who knows the value of seeing the story up close within a broader context.

Kifner belongs to a breed that recognizes its own. One night on a train from Bucharest, after covering Nicolae Ceausescu’s fall, he watched a newsmagazine correspondent pad to the washroom with slippers, pajamas, robe, and toothbrush glass. “That guy,” he remarked with a laugh to a colleague sharing the Scotch, “is going to be an editor.”