Fall/Winter 2003-04
Staying tuned in
Photo by Jayme Halbritter
In early 1991, radio correspondent Tom Gjelten found himself in Kuwait. The U.S. military had recently routed Iraqi troops from the tiny nation. But instead of celebration, Gjelten, a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, discovered frustration among soldiers stationed in the Persian Gulf. With Saddam Hussein still in power, they argued, the job remained unfinished.
Gjelten, now NPR's national security correspondent, says now, "It was amazing. You could see the thinking in 1991 that explains why we are where we are today."
His experience in Kuwait and other war zones, including Nicaragua, Colombia, and the former Yugoslavia, gave Gjelten a seasoned perspective on the most recent conflict with Iraq. As the primary reporter covering the Pentagon for much of the war, he knitted together details streaming in from multiple sources. Besides gleaning information from briefings by defense and state department officials, he also monitored and synthesized details streaming in from the front. While his colleagues provided gripping up-close perspectives of troop advances and life in Baghdad, Gjelten was charged with providing a broader view. For this veteran journalist, it was all in a day's work.
CLA beginnings
Gjelten got his start as a reporter on the staff of the Minnesota Daily in the late 1960s. He had transferred to the U from a small private college to experience something "bigger, more worldly, more diverse." He took an interest in theater, sampled widely from the U's liberal arts curriculum, and started writing features for the Daily. He served as the newspaper's first full-time state-capitol reporter and later as editorial page editor.
"The Daily was extensively critiqued by journalism faculty," Gjelten recalls. "That was how we learned journalism."
Still, he never considered a journalism major. Instead, he majored in anthropology, for "a broader education," and even considered going on to graduate school in the subject. It was a telling choice.
"Anthropology has got a lot in common with journalism," Gjelten says. "What a cultural anthropologist does is very much like being a foreign correspondent. You go into exotic places and live there for a couple years and you try to figure out the culture, and how it works, and what keeps people together and what their customs are, and their view of the world. You immerse yourself in it."
After graduation, however, Gjelten took a job as a schoolteacher on an island off the coast of Maine. That led to an interest in rural education, and after four years of teaching, he launched a new career, immersing himself in travel, research, and writing related to rural schools. He wrote a book called Schooling in Isolated Communities and traveled to distant corners of Alaska, Idaho, West Virginia, and several foreign countries.
The tales from Gjelten's travels piqued the interest of a friend who worked for NPR in Washington, where Gjelten lived. "I kept coming back with stories from all these interesting people I'd meet in these places," he recalls. "My friend said, 'You should take a tape recorder with you the next time you go.'"
Stories from real life
Gjelten began doing freelance work for public radio. "What I found was that the voices of the people were alive," he says. "I found that the radio stories were much more vivid than the print version of the same story. The personalities of the people I was interviewing came through when you heard them in their own words."
The bosses at NPR agreed. They hired Gjelten as a full-time reporter in 1982. His beat has shifted over the years, from education and labor to Eastern Europe to defense and national security. (Gjelten's wife, Martha Raddatz, now with ABC News, also once covered the Pentagon for NPR.) But public radio news junkies know that, no matter the subject, Gjelten can be relied on for a thoroughly researched account.
On campus last spring to deliver a public address, Gjelten told an interviewer, "As a reporter, you have to be comfortable with history, with literature, with social sciences, and economics. You have to be a quick student."
"If you're assigned a story on an unfamiliar subject, you have to be able to master it quickly. And the more broad-minded and solid your academic foundation is, the better you'll be able to do that."
Tom Gjelten '73 has covered the map, from warfronts to Washington.
"You could see the thinking that was going on in 1991 [in the Persian Gulf] that explains why we are where we are today."