INTERVIEW: For Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, ‘Tightrope’ is their most personal work yet
Photo: In Tightrope, Nicholas Kristof travels back to his hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, with his co-author and wife Sheryl WuDunn. Photo courtesy of Lynsey Addario / Provided by The 2050 Group with permission.
Journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof have built impressive careers out of examining and documenting many important issues in countries and cultures throughout the world. They have tracked struggles for human rights, the horrors of genocide and the fight for improved public health. Their efforts have led to best-selling books and plenty of top-of-the-industry awards. Kristof, who has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the genocide in Darfur, according to his official biography. WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business executive, lecturer and author. She currently holds the position of senior managing director of Mid-Market Securities.
Simply put, the two have led unparalleled careers of bearing witness to the troubles and the hopes of the global environment. Now, they are on their most personal journey yet.
Earlier this year WuDunn and Kristof released the book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, and now the stories and insights from that nonfiction tome are the basis for a new documentary from Show of Force, premiering tonight, Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. on WORLD Channel. In both the book and documentary, the married couple head back to Yamhill, Oregon, the place of Kristof’s youth. In this small rural town, he would take the No. 6 bus on his way to the local elementary school. Sitting alongside him, as the voiceover in Tightrope indicates, were many beloved friends and relatives — children living a seemingly typical American life.
Today, some of those people on the No. 6 bus are gone. Others are not doing well at all. WuDunn and Kristof turn some of their journalistic talents to what happened in this community, and what they find are stories similar to other ones that have played out across many towns in the United States — stories of addiction, poverty, suicide and homelessness. Tightrope, which stitches together both Yamhill’s narrative and communities across the country, doesn’t simply document the problems facing the U.S.; it also searches for some answers. This is solution-based journalism, exactly the brand that Kristof and WuDunn have promoted in recent years.
“We went from writing about people in refugee camps half a world away to writing about some of my dearest, oldest friends,” Kristof said about the personal project.
WuDunn found parallels between their reporting in the developing world and their annual trip back to Yamhill. On its surface, their careers and Kristof’s personal background may seem like polar opposites, scenes from different worlds. But they found connections, both poignant and saddening connections.
“We cover the developing world,” WuDunn said. “We cover China and Asia, and we would write about poverty, among other things. We would come home every year to Yamhill, and we would meet these people. We were friends; they would work on the family farm. And as we started probing a little more about their lives, we realized, oh my goodness, there’s a humanitarian crisis unfolding here as well as in the developing world. … People always think that poverty is out there, that it really isn’t across the tracks, or that the poverty that they see across the tracks isn’t so bad. Look, when we were traveling to some of these really terribly stricken areas abroad in Africa, some of the things that we have seen are really horrific. It’s an order of dimension that you just haven’t seen here, but the pain here that we see is just as real if not more with regard to the depths of despair.”
Kristof, whose column appears twice a week in The New York Times, said that he believes Americans perceive their country as the #1 destination in the world, and there’s a lot of truth behind this assumption. For starters, medical technology in the U.S. is superior when compared to many other parts of the world, but unfortunately that medical technology has not led to better outcomes in lifelong health.
“We rank way below European countries and Canada in health outcomes because we don’t have universal health coverage,” he said. “We have some of the best universities in the world, but we rank way down in high school graduation rates. And so we are #1 in technology or potential, but in average outcomes of Americans, we unfortunately have allowed ourselves to slip way down the list.”
WuDunn characterized the current struggles in the United States, many of which are outlined in Tightrope, as the basic struggle for the soul of a declining power. She said that global competition has definitely impacted the United States’ trajectory. This county of 325-plus million people doesn’t win out when compared to the billions in China and India, two prominent examples.
“How are we going to compete with 325 million people only 10 percent or 20 percent of whom are really functioning at full productive capacity, all eight cylinders,” she asked. “We need to lift up as many Americans as possible so that we can all win the battle on the global stage and be the winning team. I don’t think that people realize that. There’s so much more work to do. We shouldn’t be dog-eat-dog out for just ourselves. We need to realize that this nation has a lot to take care of.”
Tightrope, the film, is being released only a few days before a contentious presidential election that many people are billing as the most important vote in a generation. (Most fact-checkers would point out that this characterization is often used for presidential contests.) The two candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, have offered starkly different portraits of the current state of the country and where they hope to steer the ship. They have battled each other on everything from climate change to universal healthcare to the COVID-19 response.
Kristof, who often writes about these issues and these candidates, pointed out that the problems outlined in Tightrope didn’t start with Trump and today’s GOP, or Biden and the 2020 Democrats.
“I would say that the problems we have today weren’t caused by one party or one president,” he said. “They have accumulated over about half a century, but I do think that we have a fighting chance now to address these. And COVID, in a sense, has made some of our national shortcomings more evident. It’s a little clearer during a pandemic when you don’t have universal healthcare. … I do think that there is increasing recognition about some of these inequities on both left and right. In some ways, both Trump and [Sen.] Bernie Sanders represented rebellions against the established order and calls for change, and a lot of the things we suggest have pretty broad bipartisan support. So we’re hoping that just as the Great Depression was such a fiasco that it led to real corrective action in the form of the New Deal, that today all the failures of COVID and 70,000 Americans dying a year from overdoses, declining life expectancy, etc., that these will galvanize the country to move in some new directions, to have a New Deal for the 21st century.”
To find these solutions, Kristof and WuDunn needed to get personal, and there was some natural hesitation at first. Would looking back at Kristof’s upbringing and hometown yield answers that were too difficult to bear and depressing to digest? Would his old friends welcome the scrutiny of a New York Times columnist coming back to town with the prospects of a book deal and documentary project?
The couple thought the journey was a sound one, especially since they expand their journalistic horizons to other communities around the country, but they knew this would be difficult work.
“We want to portray some of our old friends in a fully rounded way,” Kristof said. “So it’s a lot harder to write about people you deeply care [about], especially when you do acknowledge shortcomings.”
Of the many stories in Tightrope, one person stands out. His name is Clayton, and he struggled with many of the issues that face Americans on a daily basis. Kristof and WuDunn wanted to hear his story and see how his life’s journey may have been altered if intervention came earlier. They wanted to ask whether investment rather than incarceration could have worked.
“I think it’s also important to understand that we’re not saying, ‘OK, give Clayton a subsidy.’ We’re not arguing that,” WuDunn said. “We’re arguing for more efficient spending. If you invest in early childhood education, for example, for Clayton’s kids who never got the kind of upbringing that Nick or I had, then you would actually spend less money, and your return in terms of savings … in healthcare, in court costs, in jail costs, it’s 1 to 7, 1 to 10, 1 to 11, depending on the program. Your return is $7 to $11, so there’s also a financial [reason] and there’s an economic reason to invest in these people, to invest in the future of America so that we can have long-term sustainable GDP growth. … I think people paint it as subsidies. This is not just a subsidy. There’s a real economic value there.”
WuDunn added: “We are very solutions-focused. We got that way because we growingly felt that the news business is about what is the news of the day, and it tends to be bad news — the car accidents, the traffic jams, the number of COVID deaths. So it’s usually bad news, but we knew that also people are looking for hope and solutions. We think hope is really important for attacking problems.”
Today, WuDunn and Kristof write about hope — hope that is perilously walking on a tightrope.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope premieres Monday, Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. on WORLD Channel. Streaming will be available on WORLD Channel and PBS. Click here for more information.
