A journalist-historian of Cold War crises
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.
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