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Stephen Kinzer
s-kinzer@northwestern.edu

Stephen Kinzer, a longtime New York Times foreign correspondent, teaches journalism and political science at Northwestern University and contributes articles to the New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He is also currently taking part in The Folly of Attacking Iran Tour, in which experts are traveling across the country to present options for a more rational foreign policy towards Iran.

Kinzer's most recent book is Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.  It recounts the 14 times the United States has overthrown foreign governments.  Kinzer seeks to explain why these interventions were carried out and what their long-term effects have been.

His next book, about Rwanda, will be published in June.

In 2003 Kinzer published All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.  It tells how the CIA overthrew Iran's nationalist government in 1953.

Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent.  His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events.

From 1983 to 1989, Kinzer was the Times bureau chief in Nicaragua.  In that post he covered war and upheaval in Central America.  He also wrote two books about the region.  One of them, co-authored with Stephen Schlesinger, is Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. The other one,  Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, is a social and political portrait that the New Yorker called "impressive for the refinement of its writing and also the breadth of its subject matter."

From 1990 to 1996 Kinzer was posted in Germany.  He was chief of the New York Times bureau in Bonn, and after German unification became chief of the Berlin bureau.  From there he covered the emergence of post-Communist Europe, including wars in the former Yugoslavia.

In 1996 Kinzer was named chief of the newly opened New York Times bureau in Istanbul, Turkey.  He spent four years there, traveling widely in Turkey and in the new nations of Central Asia and the Caucasus.  After completing this assignment, Kinzer published Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds.

Before joining the New York Times, Kinzer was Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe.  He was also a newspaper columnist and a state government official in Massachusetts.

 

Contributions

Iran is an opportunity, not a target
ASK THIS | February 27, 2008
Longtime New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer writes that a better understanding of Iran's history exposes the folly of pre-emptive military action. By contrast, negotiations offer tantalizing possibilities.


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