Background

Michael, welcome to Berkeley.

Nice to be here.

Where were you born and raised?

New York City.

And looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

My father worked at the United Nations, for the first fifteen years of the United Nations, so I grew up in a milieu in which there was always some discussion of international politics and the media, because my father had worked for CBS Radio at a point in time. So, that was a big part of it.

When did you get the bug to become a journalist?

I had an odd past as a child of the sixties. I was at Columbia University and I got a Master's degree in philosophy, of all things, and then I realized I had to make a course correction and do something which would lead to employment. And so, I went to the Columbia Journalism School and got a degree there, and began reporting on the United Nations for a small monthly publication put out by the United Nations Association.

What led you to this path to focus on the Pentagon and American wars?

After three years of covering UN issues, basically Namibia -- the whole collection of things that come before the Security Council -- I ended up down in Washington working for a magazine called National Journal, which is a very serious magazine, has holes in it, you keep in a binder forever. What I covered was political economy and international trade, and I worked with a guy named Bob Samuelson, who's now the economics columnist at Newsweek. After a couple of years down there, Ronald Reagan was elected president and the National Journal was looking for someone to cover the Pentagon. It was obvious to me that that was going to be a growth area because President Reagan was going to put a lot of money into it, and so I came in knowing basically nothing about the military or the Pentagon, just sort of started from scratch.

This portfolio is a terribly important one. If you were advising students, what would you tell them about the skills, the temperament, needed to become a military correspondent?

In any of these fields in journalism it's important that whatever field of endeavor you pick, you stick with it. There's an unfortunate tendency in journalism for people to become generalists. They move around and they kind of punch their ticket, they'll do a couple of years at the Pentagon, a couple of years at the White House, then they'll go abroad (I can't criticize that entirely since I went to Moscow for four years), and they become adept at doing a lot of different things for short periods. But I think it's important in journalism that people specialize to a certain extent, and that you have people who, if they're going to cover the military, at least focus on that and go to a few wars and become conversant with it. Or if you're going to cover aviation -- there was a New York Times reporter, Dick Whitkin, [who] had a pilot's license; or if you're going to cover labor, focus on that. That's key, because these areas are very complex. To cover them well requires some nuance, and that's lost if people just rotate among different beats.

To what extent did you benefit from having a philosophy background and not a journalism background in your education?

When I first shifted into the national security arena, a big focus of mine was arms control and the various negotiations with the Soviets on intermediate-range missiles, long-range missiles. I broke a couple stories about intelligence, re-estimates of the capability of Soviet missiles. So, from philosophy to arms control is not that great a leap. You know: how many warheads can stand on the head of a pin?

[laughs]

It's a bigger shift when you go to combat operations.

Next page: Covering the Military