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"A Man
for his Times"
Pomona College Magazine, Spring 1999
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 Journalist
Bill Keller ’70 says he had “the incredible luck to cover
two amazing stories”—the fall of communism and the end of
apartheid. Now his Pulitzer Prize-winning experience informs
the front page of what is arguably the country’s best
newspaper.
What you want out of a famous foreign correspondent is,
perhaps, a little drama. You’d like, first of all, a
trenchcoat. Maybe a Fedora. Flask full of bourbon in an
inside pocket. Above all, you want someone who looks like
he’s had to wear a flak jacket and keep his head down once
or twice, who’s walked these mean streets and knows the evil
that men do.
So it’s a little disconcerting that you don’t get any of
that from Bill Keller ’70, who won a Pulitzer for covering
the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, who was chief of
The New York Times bureau in Johannesburg, South
Africa, and who is now managing editor of that newspaper.
Sure, on a winter morning he does show up to breakfast
wearing a long overcoat, but he’s still surprised that the
hostess recognizes him at a restaurant a couple blocks from
the Times’ West 43rd Street headquarters. He drinks
coffee with his fruit plate—and doesn’t add any bourbon.
 None
of that makes Keller any less a famous foreign
correspondent, however. Now he is perhaps equally well-known
for his Pulitzer and for the possibility that he’ll be the
next executive editor at the Times, running the whole
show. It’s been a long trip, from a clique of journalism
wanna-bes at Pomona in the topsy-turvy late 1960s, through a
string of newspapers to the Times and eight years overseas.
“I don’t consider myself a scholar of world affairs, just a
surrogate for a reasonably intelligent reader,” Keller says.
But, he adds, “I’ve had the incredible luck to cover two
amazing stories”—communism and apartheid. And now that
experience informs the front page of what’s arguably the
country’s best newspaper.
You wouldn’t be reading this article in this magazine if it
weren’t for Keller’s father. An MIT-educated chemical
engineer and one-time chairman of Chevron, he noted his
son’s application to Reed College in Portland and calmly
suggested gazing farther south. “He said, ‘you ought to take
a look at Pomona,’” Keller recalls. “He described it as
‘Reed with shoes.’ The irony was, my roommate was a surfer
from Santa Cruz who didn’t wear shoes.”
Keller’s journalistic career started at the Collegian,
the five-college Claremont paper now called The Collage.
Senior year, he and a friend founded an alternative paper
that “existed mainly to indulge our young political
leanings,” Keller says. It was a weird time to be a
reporter, even for a college newspaper. “We were all
potentially draft bait. There were black students starting
to think about what that meant.... I marched in a few
marches, but by and large I tended to keep my distance,”
Keller says. Whether that was an early stab at journalistic
objectivity or just the temperament of a non-joiner (that
would ultimately convert into a journalist’s stance), even
Keller isn’t certain. The Pomona journalism sub-culture has
always been one of the few things on campus that might
actually constitute job training (full disclosure: Collage
also launched the career of your correspondent). Keller’s
time there was no different. At least half a dozen of his
friends and acquaintances work as writers or editors,
including the Times’ business enterprise editor, Tom Redburn
’72.
The liberal arts, though, turn out to be excellent
preparation for life as a reporter. “Ostensibly I majored in
English literature,” Keller says. “Actually, I guess I
majored in eclectic studies with a minor in serendipity.”
But Keller’s “dabbling with rigor” taught him to cover a
variety of subjects in succession, to adapt to a shifting
context. “If you choose to bounce around from thing to
thing, you’re at least expected to write the paper and pass
the test,” he says. “It’s not that different from moving
from Russia to Zimbabwe to New York.”
The first dozen years after college found Keller at a
handful of solid, smaller papers. He went from the Portland
Oregonian to the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report in
Washington, D.C., to covering Washington for the Dallas
Times Herald, then to covering the Pentagon for The New York
Times. That was 1984. Two years later, Bill Kovach, the D.C.
bureau chief, sat down at Keller’s desk and asked what his
dream foreign assignment would be. Keller said Africa. “I
noticed Bill’s eyes glaze over. He said, ‘have you thought
about Russia?’” Keller said he hadn’t, and his editor told
him he was going to Moscow. “I had no experience, no
qualifications that were evident to me, and I’ve tried since
then to figure out what it was that possessed them to send
me to Russia.”
After nine months of intensive Russian language training,
Keller flew to Moscow. His plane landed in December 1986,
and the Moscow bureau chief met him at the airport. “It was
pretty magical. Jet lag helps. It was night, so all the dim
streetlights were shining off the frost in the trees,”
Keller says. “You didn’t quite notice the incredible
shabbiness.” That winter brought with it the kind of
Napoleon-beating, Hitler-beating cold that Moscow is famous
for. “You learn things like the fact that Fahrenheit and
centigrade are the same at 40 below, because it actually
was.”
Keller’s tenure in Russia began just as the old regime was
ending—he arrived only a couple of weeks before the
government allowed dissident Andrei Sakharov to return from
his internal exile. “Even though Gorbachev had been in power
since 1985, nobody, including most Russians, had any feeling
things were going to change,” Keller says. But one indicator
to him was that travel restrictions were getting looser,
which meant reporters could actually get out and talk to
real Russians. “They were people who knew they’d been on
this detour from history and desperately wanted to rejoin
the civilized world,” Keller says. “They’d say, ‘What are we
supposed to do?’ I’d say, ‘Like I know?’ But you were an
emissary from this place where things worked.”
When the elections rolled around in March of 1989, Keller
knew he was onto something big. Gorbachev had loosened up
the process, and in some places, enough people now voted
against Party candidates that they were defeated. “Gorbachev
at that point thought it was entirely under his control,”
Keller says. But the reporters there were beginning to see
that what Gorbachev had started could take on a life of its
own. “There was a period where we [reporters] were
screaming, ‘holy shit!’” And by the time Boris Yeltsin came
on the scene—in a more vigorous and stable incarnation than
the Yeltsin of today—the revolution was in full effect.
Today, one of Keller’s responsibilities at the Times is
preparing nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. But in April
of 1989, he didn’t know much about the process and didn’t
remember that early April is when the committee announces
the winner. Keller was covering Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba.
“We landed in Havana, checked into a hotel and I had a
message to call the foreign desk,” says Keller. He made the
call and got editor Joe Lelyveld. “He said he was sorry he
called so late—they’d just been drinking champagne and
toasting my victory. I was literally thrilled speechless.”
But Keller had arranged to go out with a fellow reporter
that night. “I didn’t know how to say, ‘Jesus Christ, I just
won the Pulitzer!’” Keller remembers thinking, “I haven’t
told him up to this point; how do I tell him now?” They had
dinner, drank beers and went to bed. By the next morning,
all Keller’s colleagues had found out, and probably thought
he was humble and self-effacing instead of merely afraid of
sounding as exultant as he felt.
In October of 1991, a month after an attempted coup against
Gorbachev, Keller left Russia. By spring of 1992 he was onto
another great story: the tectonic shifts happening in the
apartheid culture of South Africa. As bureau chief in
Johannesburg, Keller was responsible for covering the 10
southern countries of Africa—civil wars in Angola and
Mozambique, white businessmen and the black government of
Zimbabwe and the eccentric post-colonial leader of Malawi,
among other stories. But, Keller says, 80 percent of his
work was taken up by South Africa and the new government
being formed just as he arrived. Nelson Mandela was out of
prison and the African National Congress was a power in
negotiations over the new constitution, but the country was
terrified. South African blacks thought the process would
collapse, either through duplicity on the part of
then-President F.W. de Klerk or because of violence between
the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party; whites feared violent
revenge. It didn’t get as bad as it could have, says Keller,
but it got bad enough. “I covered all that stuff, ducked a
few bullets (I was luckier than most), saw a bit of killing
and a lot of tension,” he writes via e-mail. “In my
memory—and this is not just distant hindsight, for it felt
this way at the time—the movement toward a freely elected
government seemed inexorable, and the making of it, the
elections and the inauguration, were occasions of real
euphoria.”
Keller came back to the U.S. in 1995, this time to New York
as his paper’s foreign editor. “It’s very easy to describe
what the foreign editor does,” he says. “The first 15 to 20
columns of The New York Times are filled with what you do
every day.” Principally that means a day’s worth of
meetings, starting with a more ruminative one in the morning
and then a more serious one at 4:30 in the afternoon, when
editors pitch their sections’ best pieces for the front
page. That’s where the top editors focus most of their
attention—those half dozen stories a Times reader sees
first. It’s a disproportionate emphasis, says Keller, but
"the silver lining of that was that people who run a
department have a lot of autonomy.” In the end, section
editors have more freedom to do what they want with their
inside stories—in the case of the international section,
those that run behind page one.
But that didn’t last long. Keller got bumped upstairs again
(only figuratively, since his office is still next to the
newsroom). As managing editor, his job is a little harder to
describe. He presides all over those meetings he used to
attend, as well as conducting job interviews, discussing
long-term strategy with the folks who handle the business
side of the paper and even dealing with logistical matters
like copy flow—the progress of stories from reporter to
editor to presses. Mostly, Keller says, it’s a matter of
doing whatever Joe Lelyveld, the executive editor, needs
done. “It’s a lot of meetings and a lot of walking around,”
Keller says.
It’s also meant a lot of attention. The New York Times is at
the top of the pyramid in a media-driven town, so changes in
the cast get attention in the local press. A recent New York
magazine article laid out some of the maneuvering in
preparation for Lelyveld’s retirement. Keller called the
piece “amusing, mainly because it managed to get so much
totally, screamingly wrong in such a short space.” As for
whether Keller really might take the throne, he points out
that Lelyveld isn’t due to retire for four years, suggesting
that publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. probably hasn’t started
thinking about it yet. “In any case, he ain’t saying. And
those who are saying, don’t know,” Keller says. “Neither do
I.”
Meanwhile, though, the Times continues to expand its foreign
coverage even as most U.S. newspapers retreat—which makes it
a good time for Keller, the experienced foreign
correspondent, to be in a top spot. “The collapse of the
Thai bhat is affecting your pension plan. This is hardly the
time to be pulling behind some wall,” he says. Medium-sized
and smaller papers are cutting back on international, even
national news, but that has allowed the Times to sell papers
all over the country to fill the gap. At a more personal
level, Keller has had the opportunity to witness first-hand
the radical remaking of two wildly different countries, and
to know some of the people who made history. It gives you
the idea that maybe he has walked his share of mean streets.
“I think I’ve fallen in love with just about every country
I’ve covered,” he says, “with the possible exception of
Angola.” Who needs a Fedora when you can toss off lines like
that?
―Adam Rogers
’92 is a science reporter for Newsweek and lives in New
York.
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