Michael T. Kaufman

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After graduating college, Kaufman taught school in Harlem but quit after a few months to become a copy boy at the Times in 1959. He was married to Rebecca in 1960 and the couple had two sons and a daughter. During his forty years at The New York Times, Kaufman worked as a foreign correspondent, reporter, and columnist. As a correspondent, he traveled the world and interviewed a number of prestigious individuals.

Kaufman travelled widely as a newspaper correspondent, plying stories from presidents, kings, and not infrequently dictators. He once interviewed the Dalai Lama. He travelled with mercenaries in Rhodesia, and reported on the wars in Angola, Aire, Ethiopia, and Zaire. After his coverage of the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, much of his later career would center on Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly his well reviewed book on George Soros published in 2002, and his books on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, life in Poland, and the Fall of Communism. His nomadic and adventurous life as a foreign correspondent included talking his way through roadblocks, befriending an agent of Israel, surviving an arrest at gunpoint, and documenting the death of Communism in Poland.

From 1975 to 1979, Kaufman covered the African continent, reporting on liberation movements, wars, and riots. He interviewed the dictators Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire and Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, winning a George Polk Award for his work. He reported from Poland from 1984 to 1988, during the waning years of Eastern European Communism. He focused on the conflicts between the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the Solidarity trade union in Poland. It was a moving personal experience, as his father had been a political prisoner there before fleeing the country for France where Kaufman was born. His insightful stories on music, politics and the lives of ordinary Polish citizens came from his existing knowledge of and new insights into Polish history and tradition.

For a short time from 1988 to 1989, and then in bi-weekly columns from 1992 to 1995, Kaufman wrote About New York, creating exceptional stories about ordinary New Yorkers. The widely read New York Times feature would be taken over by Pulitzer prize winner Jim Dwyer in 2017. In 1995, at the invitation of George Soros, Kaufman moved to Prague to edit Soros's publication, Transitions, which covered the social, economic, and political changes taking place in thirty countries moving away from communist rule. Kaufman drew on his experience covering Eastern Europe for the Times in the mid-80's and as Deputy foreign editor from 1989 to 1992, helping the times to organize their reporting on the collapse of Communism. He also wrote for The New York Times Magazine; after retiring in 1999, he wrote obituaries of world and national leaders. His books were well received and largely drew on the knowledge he had gained from his work as a journalist, the deep connection he likely had with his father, a Polish emigre with a considerable knowledge of both economics, and the political history of Eastern Europe.

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