Alumni
SPOTLIGHT “You really have to care about the world.”
Steven Erlanger ’70 on assignment, interviewing in Jerusalem’s Old City, the Muslim Quarter. RINA CASTELNUOVO
The World View
As Shaped by Steven Erlanger ’70 2020 Horace Dutton Taft Alumni Medal Honoree BURMA BANISHED HIM. Then there was a
scolding by Slobodan Milošević, the former Yugoslav president tried for war crimes. And as if that wasn’t enough of a journalism crucible, Steven Erlanger would be remiss if he didn’t mention the time he was mugged and shot in Ottawa while he was writing for The Boston Globe. “He had a gun in his windbreaker, which I never saw,” Erlanger says of his attacker, 6
Taft Bulletin / SPRING 2020
who pushed him down as he was, ironically, reaching to pick up a newspaper. A Reuters journalist came to his aid and called for help. Erlanger, now The New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, wrote a magazine piece about his scare called “Getting Shot.” “I felt like now I could go anywhere without getting hurt,” he says. Erlanger’s enduring newspaper career
is rich with vignettes of a nomadic life of warzones, far-flung capitals, language immersion programs, and contrasting cultures. It’s spanned more than 40 years, from the Iranian Revolution starting in 1978 to the breakup of the Soviet Union and now Brexit. It has been filled with a disparate cast of world leaders, cabinet ministers, despots, revolutionaries, and, naturally, memorable editors.
