David Binder (journalist)

The New York Times’ July 1, 2019, article by Robert D. McFadden on Binder’s career, entitled “David Binder, 88, Dies; Chronicled the Cold War and Its Aftermath,” stated that Binder was “[a] restless, relentless journalist [who] covered the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961 and its destruction in 1989 — bookends to his many hundreds of reports on East-West tensions and life under the Communist regimes in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.”

After his retirement from The New York Times, Binder continued to contribute to the newspaper with his researched and detailed obituaries of political or cultural figures including Egon Bahr, John Keegan, Rauf Denktash, Christa Wolf, Judith Coplon, Werner Eberlein, Spike Milligan, Hildegard Knef, Stefan Heym, Budd Boetticher and Ruth Werner. Binder was one of the contributors to The New York Times obituary of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a National Security Adviser for the Jimmy Carter administration, who died on May 26, 2017.

In November 2013, his book Fare Well Illyria was published by the Central European University Press. Amazon.com described the book as “[a] comprehensive yet concise account of the cultural and political situation in the Balkans during the last three decades of the Cold War (1960–1990). Fare Well, Illyria sums up the author’s thorough knowledge of the political and cultural history of the Balkans as well as his personal experience gained over four decades covering the region.”

Early in his career, he also worked briefly as a science reporter for The New York Times, and then returned to the post more than three decades later to report on wildlife biology. In all, Binder published over 2,400 articles, books, book reviews and commentaries before retiring from The New York Times in 2004. David published original text in English and German, and was proficient in Serbo-Croatian, Greek and French.

In 1989, Binder was appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of the newly created Mediterranean Quarterly. In its first issue, he published an article entitled “The End of the Bloc”, stating that the Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire was “falling apart before our eyes”.

Binder served on numerous occasions as a special correspondent for The New York Times, including reporting on the decline of the Soviet Bloc in 1987, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Communist regimes in the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia in 1990–1992. In the 1990s, he traveled extensively in the Balkans to report on the wars that broke out in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia (1990–1995) and the post-Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania. He also reported on the unification of West and East Germany. In 2000 and 2001, he went back to the Balkans to report on the burgeoning sex trade and drug smuggling in the region for MSNBC.

Binder gave lectures at Columbia University (“A Correspondent Reflects on Serbia 1963 – 1990”), the Wilson Center (“Combating Organized Crime in the Balkans”), the Serbian American Museum St. Sava and Indiana University and commented in articles published in various newspapers.

Binder was a journalist for The New York Times from 1961 to 2004, reporting on topics regarding Eastern and Western Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico. He served as a foreign correspondent in 1961 in Berlin, where he reported on the building of the Berlin wall. He was based in Belgrade from 1963 to 1966, in Bonn and later Berlin, Germany, from 1967 to 1973. During the latter period, he reported on the gradual rapprochement between East and West Germany, and on the Prague Spring of 1968. He then transferred to the Washington, D.C. bureau as a diplomatic correspondent, later serving as the bureau’s assistant news editor, and again as a reporter.

Born in London, Binder was raised in Highland Park, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, until the age of 13, when he left home to attend George School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. Following the academic path previously taken by his father and his older brother, he graduated from Harvard University in 1953, before attending the University of Cologne for graduate study on a Fulbright Scholarship. He worked as an assistant in American literature at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria in the summer of 1953.

Binder started his journalist career as a reporter and an editor for Carbondale Free Press-Southern-Illinoisan (1951), Louisville Times (1954–1956), Institute of Current World Affairs in Germany (1957–1959), Daily Mail in London (1959–1960) and Minneapolis Tribune (1960–1961). He also contributed to other publications including The Reporter, The Nation, The New Republic, Foreign Policy (published in Washington), Politika (a daily published in Belgrade), Vreme (a weekly published in Belgrade), Weltwoche (a Swiss weekly published in Zurich), der Spiegel (a German weekly published in Hamburg), Stern (a German magazine published in Hamburg), Neues Deutschland (a daily published in Berlin), Blaetter fuer deutsche und internationale Politik (published in Bonn), and The Wilson Quarterly (published in Washington). In 1970, he was elected president of the Verein der Ausländischen Presse (Foreign Press Association) of Germany.

David Binder (February 22, 1931 – June 30, 2019) was a British-born American journalist, author and lecturer. He resided in Evanston, Illinois, after spending most of his adult life in Washington, D.C., Germany and Serbia.

Binder was born on February 22, 1931, in London, England, along with his twin sister Deborah, to American parents Abner Carroll Binder, an American journalist best known for contributions as a newspaper correspondent and editor for the Chicago Daily News and the Minneapolis Tribune, and Dorothy (Walton) Binder. He and his twin sister had two other siblings.

Starting as an infant in 1931, Binder spent each summer of his early years with his parents and siblings at his family’s cabin on Black Oak Lake in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin where he developed his love for the wildlife, the people and the local cultures of the Northwoods of Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, Upper Peninsula of Michigan and fly fishing. He and his family continued to spend several weeks each summer at the family cabin, which he considered his spiritual home.

The Carroll Binder Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University is named after Binder’s father, a 1916 Harvard graduate, and Binder’s brother, also a 1943 Harvard graduate, and is part of the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard that “allow[s] a group of accomplished journalists — half American, half international — to come to Harvard for a year of study on the subjects of their choice.”