Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer (born August 4, 1951) is a United States author, journalist and academic. A former newspaper reporter, the veteran New York Times correspondent has filed stories from more than fifty countries on five continents, as well as published several books.

Reporting career

During the 1980s Kinzer covered revolution and social upheaval in Central America, as well as published his first book, Bitter Fruit, about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, the New York Times promoted Kinzer to bureau chief of its Berlin bureau, from which he covered the growth of Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from Soviet rule. Kinzer was the New York Times chief in the newly established bureau in Istanbul (Turkey) from 1996 to 2000.

Upon returning to the United States, Kinzer became the newspaper's culture correspondent, based in Chicago, as well as teaching at Northwestern University. Kinzer then took up residence in Boston and began teaching journalism and United States foreign policy at Boston University. As indicated below, Kinzer has written several non-fiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, the US overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present, as well as Rwanda's recovery from genocide.

Kinzer also contributes columns to the New York Review of Books and The Guardian. He is a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Views

Kinzer has opposed interventionist U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. In a 2010 interview with Imagineer Magazine, he stated:

The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call 'American values.' In many cases, if you take Chile, Guatemala, or Honduras for examples, we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those democratic, quasi-democratic, or nationalist leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.

Kinzer's reporting on Central America is criticized by Herman and Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988)

In Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, published in 2006, Kinzer critiqued U.S. foreign policy as overly interventionist.

In his 2008 book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It, Kinzer credits President Paul Kagame for the peace, development, and stability that Rwanda has enjoyed in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes the leaders of Rwanda before the genocide such as Juvenal Habyarimana.

Bibliography

• Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, with Stephen Schlesinger; Doubleday, 1982; revised ed. Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-07590-0
• Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, ISBN 0-374-13143-0
• All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, John Wiley & Sons, 2003, ISBN 0-471-26517-9
• Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Times Books, 2006, ISBN 0-8050-7861-4
• Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, with a new afterword, Harvard University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-674-02593-8
• A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-0-470-12015-6
• Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future, Times Books, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8050-9127-4.
• Reset also published as Reset Middle East: Old Friends and New Alliances: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Iran, I.B. Tauris, 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-765-0
• The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, Times Books, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8050-9497-8.

See also

• Timeline of United States military operations

External links

• Stephen Kinzer's personal website, July 2008 (videos, articles, pictures, bio, book info, upcoming events)
• Interview about the United States and Iran, Democracy Now!, March 3, 2008 (video, audio, and print transcript)
• Interview with Kinzer for Guernica Magazine
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Kinzer on Crescent & Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, October 21, 2001.
• "Empirical Evidence", on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, April 26, 2006
• "Author Kinzer Charts 'Century of Regime Change'" on NPR's Fresh Air, April 5, 2006
• Interview with Stephen Kinzer and Martha Cardenas (mp3) February 10, 2008
• Interview with Stephen Kinzer in Imagineer Magazine on Latin American foreign policy