John Kifner

Who is John Kifner?

John William Kifner is a former senior foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Kifner, who was born in 1942 in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York served as an editor on his Williams College student newspaper, The Williams Record. He joined The New York Times as a copy boy in 1963 and sought reporting assignments, becoming a metropolitan reporter with the Times in October 1988. After serving as bureau chief in Cairo from October 1985, he continued to cover both national and foreign stories. In 2003, he reported the initial attacks of the war in Iraq with the Marines and in 2004 he covered the conflict from Falluja. Kifner also was in the first Gulf War in 1991 with the 101st Airborne Division. Kifner has reported on the wars and conflict in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel-Occupied Gaza, Southern Yemen and the former Yugoslavia.

Since joining The New York Times in 1963, Kifner has been both a national and a foreign correspondent based first in Chicago and then Boston. He became bureau chief in Beirut in October 1979, then transferred to Warsaw in May 1982, and again was reassigned to Beirut in May 1984.