MICHAEL WINES

October 21, 2015 – Kentucky to the World featured special guest Michael Wines with his wife Sharon LaFraniere giving us a personal look into their professional lives as eye witnesses to world events. Pam Platt moderated the event.

 After many decades of international assignments for The New York Times, including bureau chief in Moscow, Johannesburg, South Africa and Beijing, Michael Wines has been back in the U.S. since 2012 as a national correspondent covering environmental and other issues.

Michael Wines in Grozny, February 2002, after the Russian invasion of Chechnya a few months earlier. The Russian air force had effectively leveled the city, which once housed 400,000-plus people. There was hardly a house that had not suffered damage.

Michael says, “I was predestined to be a journalist, which has been both a blessing and a curse.

I started my first newspaper at age five, in my native Shively — you go, south end! — with an ancient Underwood, typing paper and carbon sheets. I started a newspaper in my elementary school, edited my high-school and college newspapers, worked summers at newspapers in Louisville, Rochester and New York city. After a brief flirtation with law school, I worked at the Lexington Herald-Leader, then moved quickly to the late and much-lamented Louisville Times. I left Louisville in 1980 to go to Washington, where I managed to land a job with a policy magazine called National Journal, which led to a job in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, which led to a job in the Washington bureau of The New York Times in 1988.

I came to The New York Times’ attention because of my reporting on espionage issues in the dying days of the Cold War, and because of a scandal that most folks have forgotten, called Iran-Contra. I’d broken a number of stories in both areas. I think The Times may have thought I was deeply plugged into the American intelligence community. I wasn’t, but I managed to reinvent myself as a reporter on other topics, from presidential campaigns to Congress, and eventually was offered a chance to go to Moscow in 1998. From there I covered the demise of Boris Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin, then went to South Africa in 2003, and to China in 2008.”

Michael graduated with a BA from the University of Kentucky.