Deb Aronson

A Telling Effect

First appeared in Illinois Alumni magazine in March 2003 under Profiles

Barry Bearak, MS ‘75 COM, doesn’t like to talk about himself.

“It makes me self-conscious,” he said. “I get flustered.”

On the other hand, he is very good at telling other people’s stories. Bearak, a New York Times staff writer who received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the devastation of Afghanistan, has been telling other people’s stories for close to 30 years.

Bearak, who most recently was in Malawi writing about famine, has worked for The New York Times since 1997. Prior to that he was at the Los Angeles Times for 15 years and The Miami Herald for five. He has written about sports, politics, hunger, racism and war.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Bearak has received other significant honors for his reporting, such as the George Polk Award for foreign reporting, the first prize of the South Asian Journalist Association for outstanding story of the year and the Mike Berger Award, given by Columbia University for reporting about New York City. Still, Bearak is not a household name. He is happiest in the trenches, not in the spotlight.

“What he measures himself by is what he reports and what he writes,” said longtime friend and colleague Michael Winerip, a columnist at The New York Times. “It’s all that matters to him. It’s what makes him a great journalist. He’s his own toughest critic. People praise him for a story; he doesn’t listen. He knows when he’s done it right, and he knows when he hasn’t done it right. He can never take any story lightly. He is deadly serious about journalism.”

“Deadly” is not an overstatement. At one point while working in Afghanistan, four journalists were murdered while traveling the road between Jalalabad and Kabul. Two days later, when no one else was risking it, Bearak made the same trip, trusting his gut instincts that the murders were an isolated incident. While he survived the journey without a problem, once in Kabul he learned of several other attacks that he had known nothing about. In addition, Bearak was a friend and colleague of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose murder sent a chill down the spine of every newspaper reader and reporter in the world.

“Danny’s death is a terrible tragedy, and I, like many others, can’t help but believe, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’” Bearak told one interviewer.

Bearak, 52, didn’t start out risking life and limb to get the story. He grew up in Skokie, north of Chicago, and was an avid Bears and Cubs fan. His father was a traveling salesman. Bearak went to Knox College in Galesburg and majored in political science. Later, he came to the University of Illinois for a master’s degree in journalism, in part because the Columbia and University of Michigan programs had rejected him.

“I learned the basics of news writing in Gregory Hall,” Bearak said of his time on the UI campus. “It put me on firm journalistic ground. I’m deeply grateful.”

At Illinois, he once refused to cover an Urbana City Council meeting for a class assignment because it conflicted with a Monday night Bears game. Up until he left the University, he wasn’t quite sure if he was going to be a reporter or a fiction writer. He won the graduate fiction-writing award with a story titled “Rhapsody in Pigskin.” It was, in part, about football.

Then Bearak got a job as editor of the Elwood Park World and River Grove World, which were then part of the Southtown Economist chain (now called Daily Southtown).

“Barry used to joke that he was having a staff meeting, and he would get up out of his chair, and then he’d talk to his chair, and then he’d get back in his chair to answer himself,” recalled Terry Kelleher, MS ‘75 COM, now a television reviewer for People magazine.

Bearak also had an unusual way of staying in touch with his journalism professor, John Erickson, MS ‘67 COM, PHD ‘73 COM.

“After Barry left Illinois and was working for a string of weeklies there, he would periodically play a practical joke on me,” said Erickson, now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Iowa. “I’d get an irate letter from a subscriber up there on the north side just railing against this absolutely poor excuse for a journalist who was running their local paper and how could I be part of an institution that would ever give him a degree. It would go on in great detail about the kinds of things he was doing that would upset her so much. And of course it was Barry’s way of letting me know what he was up to lately without having to actually blow his own horn.

“Barry was always a fine writer and a great reporter,” added Erickson. “Whatever he wanted to do he was going to be able to. He had that kind of skill. He was very quick, very bright and very funny.”

While Bearak was a cut-up, he also had a deep sense of purpose.

“I’ve been interested in the same thing from the time I started, which is to write great stories, great in the sense that they tell stories, with a beginning, a middle and an end; they’ve got either human tragedy or human comedy,” said Bearak. “People used to ask me what kind of stories I’d like to write, and I would say, ‘I like to write stories that make people laugh or make people cry or put them in jail.’ It’s never changed. I just wanted to go where I found good stories.”

He moved to the West Palm Beach bureau of The Miami Herald, where he covered sports. “Sports was interpreted rather loosely as ‘anything that moves,’” said Bearak. “For example, a feature about the bouncer at a bar was considered ‘sports.’”

His skills moved him soon to the main office of the paper, where he met Winerip. The two have been close friends ever since.

“I was new, and Barry came up to me to tell me he liked a story I wrote,” Winerip recalled. “He has always been generous that way. Then he invited me to play on the paper’s touch football team and something called lineball. He’s intensely competitive on the field. I never beat him.”

In Miami, Bearak also met his future wife, fellow journalist Celia Dugger.

“We met at a Miami Herald party in a Holiday Inn,” said Bearak. “She was brand-new in Miami at the time. I was standing with The Miami Herald editor. I saw this woman, and she looked attractive, and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I found out. That was a Saturday, and I asked her out on a Monday. We went to a Cuban restaurant on South Beach that became important to us, and that’s all the detail I think I’ll go into,” he concluded with a laugh.

Above all else, Bearak loves his wife. He loves to talk about her. In the midst of a conversation with Bearak, he interrupts and says, “Can I say a lot more about my wife?

“My wife is the best journalist I know,” Bearak said. “She is the reason that, if I have had any success, it is owed 90 percent to her. She is a great editor in terms of talking through stories, but also reading them, seeing what’s wrong with them.”

Bearak loves Dugger with a reverence and a respect that have remained fresh throughout the 17 years of their marriage, despite the amount of stress with which their union has been fraught. For four years Bearak and Dugger were The New York Times’ co-bureau chiefs in South Asia. Based in New Delhi, India, they did all the reporting for a region that covered eight countries and 1.5 billion people, which meant they were constantly in the field, juggling who would stay home with their sons, Max and Sam, now 12 and 7.

“I remember once there was a horrible earthquake in Gujarat [India] in January of 2001,” said Dugger. “I had been there a week, working night and day, and Barry came in to relieve me. The area was completely destroyed, but we flew into a military air base. I was waiting on the tarmac to catch the flight out, and Barry came down the steps of the same flight. There were just journalists. He didn’t see me, he was about to leave and go, and we hadn’t seen each other in a while. So I’m jumping up and down, waving my arms. And he came sweeping across the tarmac, swept me into his arms and gave me a big kiss. And everybody was like, ‘Wow, how romantic!’”

His emotions also spread to his work. A compassionate man with a dry sense of humor, Bearak professes a deep love and admiration for the Afghan people.

“Afghanis are famous for two things, hospitality and revenge. So in liking them, I guess I was referring to their hospitality,” he said.

Once Bearak wrote about an Afghan man forced to sell two sons to feed the rest of his family. Bearak reported the story, wrote it and quietly bought the two boys back for $500. He never wrote that part of the story, or told anyone, except his wife. Several times he has spent his own money to buy food or other aid. Once he gave a doctor $100 to send an assistant with medicine to a village where many inhabitants were sick.

“He would never accept a gratuity from someone trying to influence his story, but if he finds himself in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, he won’t look the other way,” Dugger said.

Bearak learned he had won the Pulitzer when his editor called him at about 1 a.m. in New Delhi last spring.

“I screamed in absolute joy” when she heard, Dugger said. “Barry smiled. He was happy. He’s deserved to win a Pulitzer many times in the course of his career and has been a finalist I think two or three times, so to actually have your number come up is really thrilling.

“He did want to wake up our eldest son, Max. And Max was happy. We drank some Jack Daniels with my father [Ronnie Dugger, a newspaper man himself, who was visiting India for the first time]. The next day we got on a plane to New York for the official announcement. We left my dad to baby-sit the kids.”

Did winning the Pulitzer make Bearak feel like he’d “made it”?

“Well,” he said, “if as a grad student I had been told I would win a Pulitzer in international reporting, I suppose I would have considered that a sign of a successful career. But journalism is pretty brutal on the smug and the satisfied. With each story, I feel like I am reborn in ignorance and have to go out begging for information and insight like a blind man with a tin cup.

“For me, journalism is continuously humbling. It’s hard to think about how successful you may have become when you are overwhelmed by how confused you are in getting the next story right. You’re only as good as your last story. And in your heart of hearts you realize that every story you do is never quite as good as it ought to be.”