Kirby Neumann-Rea: Kristof moves past bitter bite, seeks new ways to foster hope
You don’t eat the tart apples in the orchard straight off the tree. They are best crushed and blended to create cider. Sample the apple plain and you’re left with a sour taste in your mouth.
Nicholas Kristof knows this full well about the apples his family grows and harvests to make cider.
For Kristof, the disappointment of not being allowed to run for governor last year, a bitter bite into politics, has fermented into optimism.
General manager of Kristof Farms with his daughter, Caroline, he helps tend the family’s heirloom apple trees. And that sometimes means chasing deer out of the hillside orchard.
This is the land where he grew up, north of Yamhill — a place and operation he values greatly, because his entire family is involved.
Life on Kristof Farms has always meant dealing with large creatures, including bears foraging in the orchard.
Beyond the fir-rimmed orchard and neighboring vineyard, it’s large issues that concern him. They include Oregon’s deep and wide social problems, its urban-rural divide, and the future of journalism.
He professes no resentment toward former Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, who in her own shortened stint in office proved instrumental in ending Kristof’s political aspirations, over disagreement about his Oregon residency.
“I don’t feel any great schadenfreude,” he said in an interview last month, conducted while walking the apple orchard with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, the company’s treasurer. “What happened was just sad,” he said.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and erstwhile governor candidate, is now back on road and keyboard, chasing stories. He and WuDunn, an author and consultant, are currently “bouncing around the country.”
They have co-authored five books, including 2020’s “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope” which deals extensively with the failed hopes of some of Kristof’s Yamhill-Carlton High School classmates. In addition, Kristof has resumed writing for his longtime employer, The New York Times.
Kristof emerged philosophical from the disappointment of a failed attempt to run for governor. He has returned to work as regular columnist for The Times — a 30-year position he quit in late 2021 to run for governor and write his forthcoming memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” due out in May 2024.
His book, by the way, will include mention of his first foray into journalism — with the News-Register in 1974, when he wrote about local government and agriculture.
He had been a long-time New York resident and voter, but had kept the family home in Yamhill and continued to consider himself an Oregonian.
Fagan ruled otherwise, and the Oregon Supreme Court agreed with her. She has since been forced from office by scandal, though Kristof also finds no joy in her downfall.
“The day that she resigned, I got a lot of somewhat gleeful texts saying ‘Karma.’ But it’s hard to be gleeful about a scandal like that,” Kristof said.
Fagan resigned in May after Willamette Week revealed she had been accepting thousands of dollars a month in consulting fees from a tax-delinquent marijuana firm heavily engaged in lobbying and campaign finance. While he generally avoids Oregon politics in his memoir, he does address the campaign venture she thwarted.
“What I want to see is not Shemia Fagan get into great trouble,” he said. “I want to see addiction addressed, homelessness and mental health addressed. I talk about deciding to take that step, and what I learned as a candidate.
“And I learned a lot,” Kristof said. “You’d sort of think being around politics and observing it directly for years, it turned out to be very different from the other side. I learned a lot about the process.”
Kristof was asked if he discerns anything he might have done differently in mounting a run for governor or pleading his case when the blowback started. He walks past six or seven apple trees as he digests the question.
“I talked with one very senior Oregon politician who said he was laughing at me — with me, after it. He said he sees people who have gone into politics after planning their course year after year after year but don’t have bonafides.”
He recalled the political veteran saying, “You do, but you didn’t do any planning ahead. If only you’d thought about it a few years ago, things might have worked out differently.’
Kristof said, “So he was teasing me for not thinking about it more ahead of time.
“I can’t complain. The upside of covering genocide, war, ill health, is it completely gives you more perspective on life’s more petty disappointments, like not being able to run for governor.”
The failed political foray provided Kristof with other lessons as well.
“I developed a huge respect for legislators, county commissioners who often make substantial sacrifices and make the system work,” he said. “That said, it did leave me feeling that the system is pretty messy, and I hope as a state we can figure out how to address some great challenges. The political toolbox didn’t work out for me, but the journalistic toolbox is one way of addressing it as well.”
Upon denial of his campaign eligibility, Kristof said, “Oregon is in a moment of crisis and it affects us all.”
Asked for his current feelings about that statement, and how it should be addressed, he said, “The state has a number of substantial challenges — housing and homelessness, addiction and mental health, and a huge urban-rural divide — and I don’t think in Oregon we have addressed enough our pre-K to university outcomes. They are not as good as they should be.
“I think the best metric for where a state will be in 25 years is its education system, and we are not doing well enough in that regard. From pre-K on.”
Kristof is working on a long series for The New York Times on solutions to America’s problems. He said it was inspired by some of the issues raise in “Tightrope.”
“All these problems are hard to fix,” he said. “Can we get to be number one in education, I don’t know. But do we need to be 41st? Probably not.”
In “Tightrope,” the authors wrote of “social poverty” – that beyond income deprivation, “educational failure, family breakdown and social dysfunction work together to destroy the individual’s dignity and self-respect.” One of the crushed lives they write about is that of a friend who, as a teenager, worked cutting wood on the Kristof farm.
As we walk, he and WuDunn come across a single tree that has withered, and talk about what caused it. They appear concerned for the whole orchard in light of the failure of one tree.
Kristof gets back to the land when asked, in a Venn diagram of Nick Kristof starting with farmer and journalist, what would be the third circle?
“Well, family,” he said. “These are kind of all family projects.
“When Sheryl and I were debating what to do with our old cherry orchard here, we had a major conversation with the kids to make sure they were going to be involved in these projects, because these grapes and apples are going to be around for many, many decades, and we didn’t want to just do this and be left with no one to take over. It’s become a family project, and it’s been a family adventure.”
And, after a year’s break, journalism also consumes Nick Kristof.
“In many ways the arc of my career is writing about things that are very up close and personal,” he said.
“I was in Tiananmen Square when troops opened fire on people, and in Darfur, I saw genocide unfold in front of me. And sex trafficking — I interviewed some young girls in a brothel and I just couldn’t get it out my mind. It’s also hard to get out of your mind when you see so many people you care about who have both suffered greatly and inflicted suffering on others.”
Kirby Neumann-Rea serves as managing editor of the News-Register, a position he has held since April 2021. The Linfield graduate, class of 1980, has edited community newspapers in Hood River, Dallas and Molalla, and worked as Port Townsend bureau reporter for the Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles, Washington. In addition to reading and playing basketball, he writes a personal newsletter, “Burn the Ax Handle,” posted on substack.com. He and his wife, Lorre, live in McMinnville.
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