Craig R. Whitney

Craig R. Whitney was born on Oct. 12, 1943, and grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts, attending public schools there until 1959, when he went to Phillips Academy in Andover, graduating in 1961. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in 1965 with a major in French History and Literature. He studied piano and organ before and during college and has been an enthusiastic and expert organ player ever since.

He began his newspaper career while in college with summer reporting jobs on The Worcester Telegram in Worcester, Massachusetts. After college he went to the Washington Bureau of The New York Times as an assistant to the columnist James B. Reston. In 1966 he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and, after earning an officer's commission in Newport, R.I., served three years in active duty as a public affairs officer -- in the Pentagon on the staff of Secretary of the Navy Paul H. Nitze and his successor, Paul Ignatius from 1966-1968, and from 1968 to 1969 in Vietnam with Seventh Fleet Detachment C, based in Saigon.

He returned to The Times in New York City as a reporter on the Metropolitan Desk in the summer of 1969, and in early 1971 returned to Vietnam as a correspondent in the Saigon Bureau, becoming Bureau Chief in 1972. Posted to Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany, as Bureau Chief in 1973, he covered Chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt and met and married Adelheid (Heidi) Witt there. Their daughter, Alexandra, was born in Bonn in 1975 and their son, Stefan, in 1977.

Shortly afterward, the family went to Moscow, where Craig was correspondent and later Bureau Chief of The Times. He and Harold Piper, a colleague from The Baltimore Sun were sued by the Soviet authorities in 1978 for allegedly slandering the State Radio and Television Committee in reporting on a nationalist dissident in (then-)Soviet Georgia, Zviad K. Gamsakhurdia, whom televised reports had showed apologizing at the end of his criminal trial for fighting for Georgian independence. Reporting in Tbilisi after the trial, Whitney and Piper wrote that some of Gamsakhurdia's friends said the recantation was phony. Both correspondents were tried in a Soviet court and lost, forced to pay fines, but then, surprisingly, not expelled.

Craig stayed until 1980, when he was transferred to New York to be Deputy Foreign Editor of The Times, and later Foreign Editor. In 1986, he went to Washington, D.C. as Bureau Chief, and in mid-1988 went to the London Bureau, and in addition to covering the fall of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher there, he was one of the Times correspondents who covered the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the subsequent reunification of Germany in 1990.

His first book, Spy Trader, about the East German lawyer and Wolfgang Vogel, who negotiated freedom not only for spies on both sides of the Cold War but also for the release of tens of thousands of East German political prisoners bought free by the West German government, was published by Times Books/Random House in 1993.

He helped cover post-reunification Germany as Bureau Chief in Bonn from 1993 to 1995, then moving to Paris as Bureau Chief and serving there until 2000, when he came back to New York City as an Assistant Managing Editor of The Times.

His next book, All the Stops, about some of the famous American organists and organbuilders who assured the pipe organ of a unique place in American musical culture, was published in 2003. He later edited and wrote the introduction for The WMD Mirage: Iraq's Decade of Deception and America's False Premise for War, a collection of official and Congressional reports on the debacle of the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq on the basis of erroneous U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, published by PublicAffairs in 2005.

He retired from The Times in 2009. He published Unraveling Time, an autobiography and an account of the struggle he and Heidi Whitney have been waging against her affliction with Alzheimer's Disease, in 2016. They live in Brooklyn.