Friedman Describes Long Career

NORMAN (3:02 p.m.) -- A tenth grade high school journalism class outside Minneapolis is the only formal journalism class Thomas L. Friedman has ever taken, he said Monday.

"We were taught that all journalists start their day by reading the New York Times," Friedman said.

Friedman's first interview for his high school newspaper was with a visiting Israeli general who was visiting the University of Minnesota: Ariel Sharon. Friedman would interview the Israeli prime minister him many times in the future.

While in high school, during the winter break of 1968, a 15-year-old Friedman joined his parents on a trip to Israel. It was his first trip on an airplane and his first trip outside of Minnesota except for a few trips to Wisconsin.

"Maybe it was the shock of the new, but it had an indelible impression on me," Friedman said of the trip.

Friedman spent the next three summers of high school in Jerusalem.

In college, Friedman started taking Arabic as a freshman and studied abroad in Jerusalem and Cairo. Once he graduated from Brandeis University, he won a scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.

While walking through the streets in England in the summer of 1975, Friedman and his "then girlfriend, now wife" saw a blaring headline on the London Evening Standard: (Jimmy) "Carter to Jews: If Elected, I Promise to Fire Dr. K."

The headline referred to Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish secretary of state. Friedman, confused about the irony since Carter wanted to win Jewish votes in that presidential election against Gerald Ford, went to his dorm room and wrote a column about it.

His girlfriend took the column back to Des Moines, where she was from, and submitted it to the Des Moines Register, where it ran as a half-page column next to an Alf cartoon. Friedman was paid $50.

"I thought that was the coolest thing in the whole world," Friedman said. "I was walking down the street, I had an opinion, I wrote it down, and someone paid me $50. And I've been hooked ever since."

Friedman has since worked for United Press International in London and Beirut and for the New York Times in Israel, Lebanon, Washington and dozens of other places.

"I get to be a tourist with an attitude," Friedman said. "It really is the best job in the world. Someone has to have it, and I've got it, and you don't."

Friedman has to have an attitude twice a week for his column twice a week.

"You really have to have strong opinions about a lot of things," he said.