Romesh Ratnesar ‘96 was a reporter, news editor and columnist at The Daily during his years on the Farm. After graduation, he joined The New Republic, and then was hired at TIME, where he worked as a foreign correspondent in London and Iraq before returning to New York to become TIME’s World Editor.

The Stanford Daily: I was interested in how you got to TIME.

Romesh Ratnesar: I left here the summer after I graduated. I did a co-term, and finished it that summer. And then moved to Washington in September of ‘96, and I started at The New Republic. It has this essentially nine-month position, a reporter-researcher position that at that time paid $200 a week and involves lots of gut work — that, you know, is basically, stock-and-trade for any magazine, that involves lots of answering phones, we had to read and respond to hundreds of manuscripts that come from people unsolicited. We had to do a lot of basic research for the editors... I was there until the end of that year, June of ‘97, then was hired by TIME and started there in New York.

TSD: How did you get from a new hire at TIME to being the World Editor?

RR: When I started at TIME, the magazine was also in a sort of transition period, and Walter Isaacson wanted to hire some younger writers, which TIME did not really do. TIME had this really unique structure where you had lots of old, nearly deceased writers sitting in an office in New York. For years and years and years, it was the model that they would sit there and correspondents would send them files about what was going on in Beijing or Moscow or Johannesburg, and we would have a team of writers in New York who would take the files and then reprocess them into TIME stories. And their names would be at the top, and the people who did all the work would be at the bottom. Walter wanted to shake that up, he wanted writers who could do both, so he hired me, he hired Joel [Stein ‘93], he hired another couple of younger people, and he threw us into it.

My first week there, I was handed what seemed like a gargantuan task — it was a two-page story, and I had to turn it around in two to three days. I just kind of took off from there — I think TIME is the kind of place, as is the case in most news organizations — if you show you’re capable of writing, writing quickly, writing cleanly, writing clearly, you’ll succeed. I worked in New York for two, three years, then I went to London for a year. I came back after Sept. 11, and wrote exclusively on terrorism and the Middle East until the invasion of Iraq, and then I went to Iraq.

TSD: What was the newsroom like on Sept. 11?

RR: Well, I was in London...basically, I think people got into the office if they could and Jim Kelly, the editor, said, this is the biggest of our lifetime, so get to work and most of the staff headed out to report what was going on downtown. But that was in New York, and I was stuck in London, which was frustrating. But it definitely convinced me that it was time to get back to [New York]...there wasn’t a lot to do in London at that stage.

TSD: When were you in Iraq as a correspondent?

RR: I haven’t been back there in a couple years. I was there for six months in 2003 and a couple weeks in 2004, and then I became the foreign editor after that. But Iraq at that stage was a lot of fun as a journalist. It was an amazing story — there was so much happening, so much uncertainty about where things were going to go. A lot of people look back and say that all the seeds of failure were planted in those early days. And it’s true, if you go back and think about it. I think about some of the conversations I had with people that had much more experience than I did — there was great skepticism among professional diplomats who were there. They were skeptical about the American bureaucracy, the American government’s ability to pull this off. They weren’t necessarily skeptical about whether it was a good thing to get rid of Saddam and they weren’t skeptical about whether the Iraqi people weren’t better off on balance. But they were skeptical that the Americans could make it work. And that was something, I guess, that I didn’t really grasp fully at that time.

But the story was great — there were a lot of young people. You can’t go to Iraq if you’ve got a family, so there were lots of young writers, young photographers, activists, NGOs. There was instant community — it was a little bit like being in college.

TSD: [laughter] Do you miss being in the field?

RR: Yeah, yeah I do, and I will probably go back to being in the field at some stage...I would hate to wake up in twenty years and still be chained to a desk. But I really like what I do now — to shape coverage. When you’re an editor you’re involved in a lot of different decisions... [and] that’s fine. The other problem with being out in the field, to some extent, is that you’re filing stories and they’re not running... With the Internet, things are a bit different — stories that don’t run on the print magazine you write for online.

TSD: Did you feel like you were doing significantly different work than colleagues at the New York Times and Washington Post because you weren’t on pressure to file every day?

RR: Yeah, I spent the last month working on one story — I didn’t do anything else, just reporting one story. That’s not a luxury available to most other journalists there. But the New York Times correspondents have to churn out not only stories every day, but some of them have to write three or four versions of the same story a day. But these people, who have been there reporting from the beginning, have done incredible work...they’re real heroes.

TSD: Would you want their job?

RR: Nah... I think one thing you realize in life is you have to be honest with yourself with what you think you want to do and what you’re actually good at. I know I’m never going to be a good war correspondent; I’m not constitutionally up for it. I have that desire, but it’s not what I see in my mind my life being about.

TSD: And being on the front line, being in the war zone, being under fire — you weren’t really into that?

RR: Yeah, you don’t have to do that sort of thing, you know. You’d only do it if you really felt you’d enjoy it, and I mean, I can see the appeal, but there are other things I want to do with my life.

TSD: Like what? You were in Iraq for a bit, now you’re editing in New York, but you don’t want to be doing that forever. What are you aiming for — what would you like to do, ideally?

RR: I will hopefully write for books. I’m writing one now, at least starting one. I think most people in journalism long to run something, at some point in life. The thing about journalism is that it isn’t a linear path, the way other professions are — and if you think it is, you’re in the wrong job. Journalism is something you do your whole life. There’s a reason journalists become journalists and not academics, and that’s because journalists like me like to cover a wide variety of things. I imagine at some stage I’ll leave journalism, and try my hand at another line of work. But I think I’ll always come back to writing.

TSD: What was driving you to go into writing in the first place? Did you want to learn, did you find something out, persuade people of something...

RR: Writing just kind of came to me, I guess. I don’t think I went into this with a larger mission, but I understand and I appreciate and I’m grateful for the impact you can have. Even now when people read your stories, I don’t know if they make a difference in terms of grand social change, but they make a difference in that they make people’s lives a little more enjoyable, and that’s a good feeling. Even if they hate the stuff I write, I’m glad I get people thinking, get them talking, and maybe get them angry.

TSD: So what’s the most interesting story you’ve reported on?

RR: The story I feel the most ownership in, pride in was the Person of the Year story for 2003. The person of the year was The American Soldier, and the story was a profile of a platoon of soldiers who we lived with, myself and Michael Weisskopf. We lived with these guys and went on patrol with them every day, and spent the better part of a month with them, and we wrote a story.

It was punctuated by the very last night we were reporting — Michael was riding around in the back in the truck, I was writing the story back in our house, a grenade was thrown into the truck, Michael picked the grenade up to throw it out, it blew up in his hand, he lost his right hand. Our photographer, Jim Nachtwey, was injured in that incident as well. They both would have died if Michael had not picked up the grenade. The next 48 hours were basically trying to get this guy to emergency treatment. The military was a bit hesitant about it. And the story came out — after Michael was airlifted I finished the story. Aside from that incident, I’m proud of that story as a narrative piece of reporting; partly because I spent a lot of time on it and felt close to the subjects.

TSD: You were saying that you didn’t have the constitution to be a war reporter? Was it the uncertainty? Was it the chaos? What gets to you?

RR: It was the uncertainty, it was the stress... it was the boredom. You have to suppress the boredom if you’re spending time with American troops. Today, the vast amount of reporting is done by Iraqis who go out and bring the content back to American journalists. And if you’re with them, you’ll hang out, spend an hour or two going out on patrol. You go out and see what’s happening maybe four hours a day, and the rest of the time you’re just sitting around.

The military guys, the officers, are doing stuff during that time — there is a lot of shit that the military has to deal with that we don’t even... It’s a huge bureaucratic machine there. What was amazing about being in Iraq is how quickly that machine is recreated at a very local level throughout. As soon as they get there, they get there, instantly set up these vast bases. Just maintaining the bases is, I don’t know, half the time and energy the troops spend there is supporting the infrastructure, force protection. But for journalists, that’s not very interesting. The bottom line is that I’m not driven to be at the front line and dodge bullets. And I’ve never had to do it. That night was the one exception, but it was an exception.

TSD: What are your thoughts about what’s going to happen there? Do you think being in your current position gives you any additional wisdom?

RR: No, I don’t think it does. I have the luxury of being paid to read a lot of stuff that everyone else reads. I get the reports from people in the field, and I get to see it, but I don’t think I have any special insight. I feel like a lot of people feel like Iraq is deteriorating, and our ability to reverse that is dwindling. It seems to me like what we’re doing is basically preventing things from getting worse, but we have no ability at this stage to make things better. And that’s disheartening. To most Americans, that’s not something we’re used to confronting. I think there will be a lot of lessons learned from this — I guess we’re stuck there, because we’re the only honest broker to some extent now. And of course, the longer we stay, the less leverage we have over Iran, and to send troops to Afghanistan if we want to.

I hope we’ll see basically disengagement, not a withdrawal, a reduction of our presence there to some sort of minimally acceptable level, and then you know, you just have to wait. I think you have to wait it out. If they’re going to fight it out between themselves, then there’s nothing we can do about it.

TSD: What was your worldview coming into this, and how has reporting changed it, if it has changed it?

RR: I think where I was a few years ago I had this idea that there are certain ideas and certain values that are applicable across cultures and across... As Condi Rice often says, it is the height of condescension to say that the Arab world should not have democracy the way the rest of the world does. Well, I’m less sure of that today. We’re not good at understanding and appreciation the cultural limitations or the cultural, I don’t know, peculiarities that stand in the way of our importing our version and the way we want things done and the way we think things should be done into other areas of the world. I think we have to figure out a way in which we stand for our ideals, and we are true to those values but we’re not naive to think we can easily impose them. And that’s the ultimate tragedy of Iraq, the naivete, and the belief...

I had dinner with Karl Vick the other day, and he said the fundamental problem is not that Arabs are averse to Westerners, it’s that they’re averse to Western soldiers — they don’t want American tanks in their streets.

TSD: Just because this is The Stanford Daily, what was your experience with Condoleezza Rice here? Did you have any?

RR: Yeah, I knew her. I still see her from time to time. I covered her for The Daily, and I also took her class, an undergraduate seminar on the end of the Cold War. So I knew her pretty well, and I’ve seen her a half-dozen times or so since she joined the administration.

My experience has been a positive one — she’s a great teacher, she was great for Stanford. She was a controversial figure in terms of the policies which she pursued when she was a provost — [she] ruffled a lot of feathers... If she had stayed, and wanted the job [as President of Stanford] she certainly would have been on the short list. She was a good person to know as a reporter — I had a good relationship with her, so I got stories out of her. She was the number two official at Stanford, so as a reporter, she was a big deal.

I knew she was going to end up in Washington...you know, looking back, I remember writing a long profile of her, and somebody said — I think I asked a question whether she’ll be considered a future president of Stanford, and someone said, “I think she’ll be someday considered as a future president of the United States.” And I said, “Well, that’s a stretch” — it struck me as somewhat ambitious — but look where we are now. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think it’s part of the conversation.