1954–
A journalist-historian of Cold War crises
In his Berlin 1961, Kempe records General Lucius Clay's retort to President Kennedy at the height of the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington."
Frederick Kempe is an American journalist and author whose German family background and European reporting shaped his work on Cold War politics and transatlantic affairs. His major book, Berlin 1961, combines newly declassified American, Soviet, and German documents with interviews to reconstruct the building of the Berlin Wall and the October tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. The book interprets Kennedy's crisis management as weakness and places Khrushchev's decisions within their political constraints, an asymmetry that an independent review challenged and made part of the work's historiographical significance.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1977Graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism
- 1981Joined The Wall Street Journal as a London correspondent
- 1984Opened The Wall Street Journal's Vienna bureau
- 1990Became The Wall Street Journal's Berlin bureau chief
- 1992–1997Senior editor at The Wall Street Journal; founded Central European Economic Review
- 2002–2005European editor of the global Wall Street Journal
- 2007–President and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council
- 2011Published Berlin 1961
Related historical events
Book-length reporting before Berlin 1961: Noriega and German identity
Before Berlin 1961, Kempe had already published four books of extended reporting. He worked Panama stories from 1985-1986 and published Divorcing the Dictator: America's Bungled Affair with Noriega in 1990, after the December 1989 U.S. invasion, appearing on C-SPAN's Booknotes that March 11. His premise was that the United States opened the relationship in 1960 without weighing the consequences, and that the intelligence, counterintelligence and demolition training Noriega received as America's man let him rise through the ranks. In that interview Kempe described meeting Noriega at the Rio Alto base in November 1988; the promised long interviews never materialized, and he worked instead through the dictator's childhood friends and political allies. He characterized Noriega as an intelligence agent rather than a dictator, lacking both charisma and ideology.
FATHER/LAND: A Personal Search for the New Germany (1999) is a different kind of work. A reporter of German parentage with some twenty years on German affairs, Kempe found in his father's papers evidence that the man admired Hitler and held anti-Semitic and racist views, and established from German archives the extent of a great-uncle's likely killing of Jews under his control. The reviewer treated this family material as the personal strand of a book whose central thread is Germany's guilt over the Holocaust, which Kempe judged the current generation was handling better than its parents and grandparents had. He also read German identity through the position of the country's Turkish population, then 2.5 million strong. Kempe was optimistic about a Germany adopting American economic and cultural models and growing, in the reviewer's words, less German; the reviewer left it to each reader to decide whether becoming more American was good.