Jeffrey Bruce Klein
Encyclopedia
Jeffrey Bruce Klein is an investigative journalist who co-founded Mother Jones (magazine)
in 1976.
For its first issue he found a piece that won a National Magazine Award
. He forced the resignation of Ronald Reagan
’s chief foreign policy advisor, Richard V. Allen
, at the 1980 Republican National Convention
. At the San Jose Mercury News
from 1983-92, he investigated The Pentagon
’s secret programs to dominate space. Susan Faludi
began Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women while working for Klein there. Returning in the 1990s to be Mother Jones’ editor-in-chief, Klein directed exposes of Newt Gingrich
, Bob Dole
, the top 400 political contributors in the U.S. and Donald Sipple, the Republican's star image-maker. The investigative series on Speaker Gingrich led to his unprecedented public reprimand by the United States House of Representatives
and a $300,000 fine. Klein made Mother Jones the first general interest magazine to place its content on the Internet. In 2005, he co-produced for the The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
a series on China’s rising economy that won a Gerald Loeb Award
.
to Dr. Harold and Helen Klein. When Klein was 12, his father died of a heart attack on the golf course; his mother’s multiple sclerosis
flared and she became bedridden. Klein attended Scranton Central High School and Columbia University
. During his senior year at Columbia, he studied “the moral life in the process of revising itself”
under Lionel Trilling
, who was preparing to give the Norton lectures at Harvard the following year. Klein’s first published article, “A Cuban Journal,” appeared in the Winter 1970 Columbia Forum; it critiqued his experiences cutting sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba.
magazine in 1976, in the wake of the Vietnamese War and Watergate. For its first issue, Klein found a memoir about growing up in Beijing by Li-li Ch'en that won a National Magazine Award
. In 1977, Klein became the magazine’s second managing editor; Adam Hochschild
had been the first. When Larry Flynt
expressed an interest in distributing Mother Jones, Klein used the opportunity to do a “Born Again Porn” profile of Flynt and Hustler’s demographics, which were disclosed to be much broader than the presumed blue collar audience. His article “Esalen Slides Off The Cliff” shook up that human potential retreat perched on the California coast by showing its co-founder being duped by a psychic. His story predicting what might happen during the first four years of a Reagan Administration contained a co-written sidebar exposing that Reagan’s chief foreign policy adviser, Richard V. Allen, had been on the payroll of Robert Vesco (then the world’s largest swindler and a fugitive) at the same time that Allen was working in Nixon’s White House. Allen was forced to resign from the campaign, but was appointed National Security Advisor after Reagan’s landslide victory. Allen resigned a second time when other personal scandals came to light.
based on his reporting; the novel was first serialized in the Mercury-News.
and sold well, but also led to Klein’s resignation from Mother Jones because of the parent board’s displeasure.
and started a software company. He co-produced for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
a 7-part series on China’s economy. The series won a 2006 Loeb award
, journalism’s top award for economics and business reporting. With Paolo Pontoniere, Klein authored pieces about secret trade-offs made by the U.S. prior to the Iraq War and about the mysterious deaths of two European telecom engineers immediately after they discovered sophisticated bugs planted in the hubs of their telecommunications systems.
article said Klein’s editorial positions were but one side of a split between two progressive camps. “The rift at San Francisco's MoJo, a liberal standard-bearer since its founding, reflects strains within the left in general. From Washington, D.C., to Berkeley, liberals are divided over whether to adhere to 1960s-rooted values or to rethink approaches toward achieving the goals of feminism, affirmative action and other causes.” Klein’s criticism that liberals’ continuing support of affirmative action was eroding their moral credibility came under fire from many, including C. Eric Lincoln, Derrick Bell and the anthology “Multiculturalism in the United States.”
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
in 1976.
For its first issue he found a piece that won a National Magazine Award
National Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards are a series of US awards that honor excellence in the magazine industry. They are administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City...
. He forced the resignation of Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
’s chief foreign policy advisor, Richard V. Allen
Richard V. Allen
Richard Vincent Allen was the United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982.Allen was born in 1936 in Collingswood, New Jersey. A graduate of Saint Francis Preparatory School in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, Allen received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the...
, at the 1980 Republican National Convention
Republican National Convention
The Republican National Convention is the presidential nominating convention of the Republican Party of the United States. Convened by the Republican National Committee, the stated purpose of the convocation is to nominate an official candidate in an upcoming U.S...
. At the San Jose Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
The San Jose Mercury News is a daily newspaper in San Jose, California. On its web site, however, it calls itself Silicon Valley Mercury News. The paper is owned by MediaNews Group...
from 1983-92, he investigated The Pentagon
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
’s secret programs to dominate space. Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi
Susan C. Faludi is an American feminist, journalist and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee thought showed the "human costs of high finance".-Biographical...
began Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women while working for Klein there. Returning in the 1990s to be Mother Jones’ editor-in-chief, Klein directed exposes of Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich
Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich is a U.S. Republican Party politician who served as the House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995 and as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999....
, Bob Dole
Bob Dole
Robert Joseph "Bob" Dole is an American attorney and politician. Dole represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1969 to 1996, was Gerald Ford's Vice Presidential running mate in the 1976 presidential election, and was Senate Majority Leader from 1985 to 1987 and in 1995 and 1996...
, the top 400 political contributors in the U.S. and Donald Sipple, the Republican's star image-maker. The investigative series on Speaker Gingrich led to his unprecedented public reprimand by the United States House of Representatives
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
and a $300,000 fine. Klein made Mother Jones the first general interest magazine to place its content on the Internet. In 2005, he co-produced for the The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
PBS NewsHour is an evening television news program broadcast weeknights on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. The show is produced by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, a company co-owned by former anchors Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, and Liberty Media, which owns a 65% stake in the...
a series on China’s rising economy that won a Gerald Loeb Award
Gerald Loeb Award
The Gerald Loeb Award, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was established in 1957 by Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of...
.
Early career
Klein was born in the Hill Section of Scranton, PennsylvaniaScranton, Pennsylvania
Scranton is a city in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, United States. It is the county seat of Lackawanna County and the largest principal city in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area. Scranton had a population of 76,089 in 2010, according to the U.S...
to Dr. Harold and Helen Klein. When Klein was 12, his father died of a heart attack on the golf course; his mother’s multiple sclerosis
Multiple sclerosis
Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease in which the fatty myelin sheaths around the axons of the brain and spinal cord are damaged, leading to demyelination and scarring as well as a broad spectrum of signs and symptoms...
flared and she became bedridden. Klein attended Scranton Central High School and Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. During his senior year at Columbia, he studied “the moral life in the process of revising itself”
Sincerity and Authenticity
Sincerity and Authenticity is a book by Lionel Trilling, based on a series of lectures he delivered in 1970 as Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University....
under Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
, who was preparing to give the Norton lectures at Harvard the following year. Klein’s first published article, “A Cuban Journal,” appeared in the Winter 1970 Columbia Forum; it critiqued his experiences cutting sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba.
Co-founding Mother Jones
Klein was one of the journalists who founded Mother JonesMother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
magazine in 1976, in the wake of the Vietnamese War and Watergate. For its first issue, Klein found a memoir about growing up in Beijing by Li-li Ch'en that won a National Magazine Award
National Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards are a series of US awards that honor excellence in the magazine industry. They are administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City...
. In 1977, Klein became the magazine’s second managing editor; Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild is an American author and journalist.-Biography:Hochschild was born in New York City. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964...
had been the first. When Larry Flynt
Larry Flynt
Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. is an American publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications . In 2003, Arena magazine listed him as the number one on the "50 Powerful People in Porn" list....
expressed an interest in distributing Mother Jones, Klein used the opportunity to do a “Born Again Porn” profile of Flynt and Hustler’s demographics, which were disclosed to be much broader than the presumed blue collar audience. His article “Esalen Slides Off The Cliff” shook up that human potential retreat perched on the California coast by showing its co-founder being duped by a psychic. His story predicting what might happen during the first four years of a Reagan Administration contained a co-written sidebar exposing that Reagan’s chief foreign policy adviser, Richard V. Allen, had been on the payroll of Robert Vesco (then the world’s largest swindler and a fugitive) at the same time that Allen was working in Nixon’s White House. Allen was forced to resign from the campaign, but was appointed National Security Advisor after Reagan’s landslide victory. Allen resigned a second time when other personal scandals came to light.
At the San Jose Mercury News
After a stint as the editor-in-chief of San Francisco magazine, Klein founded West, the Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News, in 1982. The magazine sought to penetrate Silicon Valley. A satiric look at Valley’s top powerbrokers provoked ire from the newspaper’s publisher, Tony Ridder, and also led to the founding of the cheeky magazine Upside. Susan Faludi began her book “Backlash” as a series of articles for West. While editing at the Mercury-News, Klein also reported on the Pentagon’s efforts, through its black budget, to dominate space. With Dan Stober, he co-wrote "The American Empire In Space: 'Star Wars' -- The Strategic Defense Initiative -- Has Become The Space Domination Initiative." He also wrote a thriller called “The Black Hole Affair” .based on his reporting; the novel was first serialized in the Mercury-News.
Returning as editor-in-chief
In the fall of 1992, Klein returned to Mother Jones as editor-in-chief. He brought an intense focus on how money influenced Washington politics. Mother Jones began posting its magazine content on the Internet in November 1993, the first general interest magazine to do so. In the March/April 1996 issue, the magazine published the first Mother Jones 400, a list of the largest individual donors to federal political campaigns along with reporting on what favors the donors received in exchange. On MotherJones.com (then known as the MoJo Wire) the donors were listed in a searchable database.The House Speaker’s reprimand
Klein directed a series of exposes, called “Countdown to Indictment,” that dissected House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s empire and its shady financing. Thanks in part to this series, the House Ethics Committee hired an outside counsel to investigate Gingrich. With the Speaker in charge of the House, the Committee’s final hearing was unilaterally reduced from five days to one afternoon, the Friday before the Presidential inauguration. For the Pacifica radio stations, Klein co-hosted gavel-to-gavel live coverage with Amy Goodman the only media to do so. The Ethics Committee ultimately recommended that Gingrich be reprimanded and forced to pay a $300,000 fine. On January 21, 1997, the full House voted overwhelmingly to accept the Ethics Committee’s recommendation, the first time in its 208-year history that the House disciplined its Speaker for ethical wrongdoing.Bob Dole and tobacco
In 1996, Klein published a 40-page investigative package on the tobacco industry’s attempt to roll back regulation by electing as president Bob Dole. Frank Rich wrote about the Mother Jones package in The New York Times and highlighted Klein’s claim that the 1996 Presidential election was "The Tobacco Election. Dole was subsequently forced by reporters to defend his support by and for the tobacco industry. He stumbled, saying nicotine was no more addictive than milk. Rather than appearing corrupt, Dole seemed out-of-touch and his image suffered. In the Family Guy episode "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington,” Peter meets Bob Dole, who states, "Bob Dole is a friend of the tobacco industry. Bob Dole likes your style...." then Dole repeatedly refers to himself in third person until he falls asleep.Exposing the Republicans' image-maker
In 1997 Klein accepted and fortified an investigative piece on Republican image-maker Donald Sipple, who had crafted “strong character campaigns” for Bob Dole, George Bush and his son George W., and Pete Wilson while trashing the personal reputations of their Democratic opponents, such as Bill Clinton, Ann Richards and Kathleen Brown. Sipple's attack ads mirrored the hidden past of a vindictive man who beat his first two wives. The story was originally written for George magazine by staffer Richard Blow, then rejected by George editor-in-chief John Kennedy, Jr. under intense pressure from Sipple and advice from Kennedy’s sister Caroline. When the expose appeared in Mother Jones, Sipple responded with a $12.6 million defamation suit, but both ex-wives vouched for the accuracy of the article. Sipple appealed all the way up to the California Supreme Court, where his suit was dismissed and Sipple was forced to pay Mother Jones’ court costs. All of these exposes brought the magazine and Klein into the full glare of the talk-show circuit.Controversial departure
Klein often took a critical stance towards traditional progressive positions. A special issue on spirituality published during the 1997 holiday season was praised by columnists such as The Washington Post’s William RaspberryWilliam Raspberry
William Raspberry is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated American public affairs columnist. He was also the Knight Professor of the Practice of Communications and Journalism at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University...
and sold well, but also led to Klein’s resignation from Mother Jones because of the parent board’s displeasure.
Recent work
Klein subsequently taught journalism at Stanford UniversityStanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and started a software company. He co-produced for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
PBS NewsHour is an evening television news program broadcast weeknights on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. The show is produced by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, a company co-owned by former anchors Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, and Liberty Media, which owns a 65% stake in the...
a 7-part series on China’s economy. The series won a 2006 Loeb award
Gerald Loeb Award
The Gerald Loeb Award, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was established in 1957 by Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of...
, journalism’s top award for economics and business reporting. With Paolo Pontoniere, Klein authored pieces about secret trade-offs made by the U.S. prior to the Iraq War and about the mysterious deaths of two European telecom engineers immediately after they discovered sophisticated bugs planted in the hubs of their telecommunications systems.
Criticism
Charles Peters, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly, said in The New York Times: "There has been this strong movement on the left that is trying to free themselves from the automatic clichés of the left. That is praiseworthy. But I think Jeff and all the former left is in danger of losing the passion for the downtrodden and losing touch with the people I worry most about: the working poor and the lower middle class." A San Francisco ChronicleSan Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
article said Klein’s editorial positions were but one side of a split between two progressive camps. “The rift at San Francisco's MoJo, a liberal standard-bearer since its founding, reflects strains within the left in general. From Washington, D.C., to Berkeley, liberals are divided over whether to adhere to 1960s-rooted values or to rethink approaches toward achieving the goals of feminism, affirmative action and other causes.” Klein’s criticism that liberals’ continuing support of affirmative action was eroding their moral credibility came under fire from many, including C. Eric Lincoln, Derrick Bell and the anthology “Multiculturalism in the United States.”
Personal
Klein has two children (Jacob and Jonah) from his marriage to Judith Weinstein Klein, a therapist and authority on ethnic self-esteem. She died at their home on Aug. 9, 1996, the couple’s 25th wedding anniversary. A second marriage ended in divorce.Quotes
- "Because I'm technologically able to find a like-minded person on the other side of the globe, I'm also more interested in making friends with my next-door neighbor." -Jeff Klein, Quoteworld
- “Marx did not recognize that our desire to connect with a transcendent power runs even deeper than our drive for economic satisfaction. Each of us seeks. How we honor each other's search will tell the tale of the next millennium.” -Jeffrey Klein
- “Most reporters are sheep in wolves’ clothing.” -Jeffrey Klein, Gannett Foundation Calendar
External links
- Editor's Notes Written by Klein, Motherjones.com archives
- Controversy Over Klein’s Departure as Editor-in-Chief, salon.com "Media Circus", Ashley Craddock, August 1998
- More Controversy Over Klein’s Departure as Editor-in-Chief, SFGate.com, August 29, 1998
- Radio Interview on the Gingrich Hearing before the House Ethics Committee, from Democracynow.org, January 20, 1997
- Article on the 20th Anniversary of Mother Jones, SFGate.com, David Armstrong, February 4, 1996
- Al Jazeera series featuring Klein on the mysterious deaths of two telecom security chiefs: Greek and Italian
- Articles by Jeffrey Klein for Alternet.org
- Was Presidential Helicopter Deal a Pay Off for Italy's Pre-War Yellowcake Intel? Article co-written by Klein for NewAmericaMedia.org
- Chapter from The Governance of Knowledge called “The New Human Zoo”. Klein's chapter predicts that humans will genetically enhance themselves imminently. The Governance of Knowledge is edited by Nico Stehr.