Wolf Blitzer

Wolf Blitzer grew up in Buffalo, New York, as the son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors.[3] His father, David Blitzer, grew up in Oświęcim — the Polish city later known by the Germanized name Auschwitz — and his mother was also a Polish Jewish refugee.[3] All four of Blitzer's grandparents were murdered during the Holocaust, and he has said that he was named after his two grandfathers.[3] His parents arrived in the United States after World War II with little money and no English, settling in Buffalo through the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 after his father spotted a visa line in Munich and signed up the family without knowing that Buffalo was 400 miles from New York City.[3] David Blitzer eventually became a major homebuilder in Western New York.[3]

Blitzer has spoken of growing up in a household where his parents openly discussed their wartime experiences, describing them as "the most patriotic Americans I ever knew."[10] He confronted that family history when he visited Auschwitz in 2014, where his grandparents had perished.[10] His grandparents were killed on Yom Kippur, while both his nephew and his daughter were later born on Yom Kippur.[11]

He attended Kenmore West Senior High School and earned a B.A. in history from the University of Buffalo in 1970.[2] He completed an M.A. in international relations at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in 1972 and spent a year studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[2][11]

Blitzer began his journalism career in the early 1970s with Reuters in Tel Aviv.[2] In 1973 he became the Washington correspondent for the English-language Jerusalem Post, a position he held until 1990.[2] During those years he interviewed several American presidents and secretaries of state and reported from Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, focusing on the intersection of Middle East affairs and U.S. foreign policy.[2]

His career during this period also included work at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he edited the monthly Near East Report in the mid-1970s.[2] A Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs account states that he also filed for Yedioth Ahronoth under the pen name "Zev Barak."[12] Blitzer wrote for Hebrew-language newspapers under two aliases: Ze'ev Blitzer for Al-HaMishmar and Ze'ev Barak for Yedioth Ahronoth. Ze'ev means "wolf" in Hebrew, while Barak means "lightning," corresponding to the German word Blitz.[2]

Among the major events Blitzer covered were Willy Brandt's 1973 visit to Israel, described as the first by a German chancellor; the first Israeli-Egyptian peace conference in Egypt in 1977; and the concluding 1979 negotiations that produced the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.[11] He also published journalism for Hadassah Magazine, including a December 1985 article titled "Moscow on The Potomac."[13] While serving as the Jerusalem Post's Washington bureau chief, he authored Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook, published by Oxford University Press in 1985.[11][14]

One of the most consequential episodes of Blitzer's pre-CNN career was his coverage of Jonathan Pollard, an American naval-intelligence employee convicted of spying for Israel. Blitzer was the first journalist to interview Pollard and later wrote a book about the affair.[2] On November 20, 1986, while still a Jerusalem Post correspondent, he interviewed Pollard at Petersburg Federal Correctional Institution; the interview was subsequently published in the Jerusalem Post and reprinted in The Washington Post and The New York Times.[15] A 1987 U.S. government filing also identifies a February 15 Washington Post article about Pollard as having been authored by Blitzer.[16] Blitzer's Territory of Lies, published by Harper & Row in 1989, examined the Pollard affair.[11]

Blitzer joined CNN in 1990 as a military-affairs correspondent.[2] His coverage of the Persian Gulf War earned widespread recognition and a Golden CableACE Award shared with other CNN correspondents.[2] He became CNN's senior White House correspondent in 1992 and covered the administration of President Bill Clinton in that role until 1999.[2] He was later referred to as CNN's chief diplomatic correspondent in a Library of Congress oral history.[17]

Archived White House material records Blitzer interviewing President Clinton on CNN's Late Edition on June 20, 1999.[8] At a White House press availability the following month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told him, "Wolf Blitzer, you are half American, half Israel, so you get priority."[18] State Department transcripts document Late Edition interviews with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in January 2001,[4] Colin Powell in January 2003,[5] and Condoleezza Rice in Jerusalem in June 2005.[6] Another transcript records a May 2006 interview with Rice about U.S. policy toward Iran and terrorism, while a 2016 archive records an interview with Secretary of State John Kerry.[19][7]

From 1998 to 2009 Blitzer hosted Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and from 2000 to 2005 he presented Wolf Blitzer Reports.[20] On August 8, 2005, he became anchor of CNN's The Situation Room, the role for which he became most broadly recognized.[2] In 2014 he hosted a CNN discussion of nuclear negotiations with Iran.[21] By 2022, Blitzer had been with CNN for 32 years and continued to cover the Middle East for the network.[3]

Blitzer received an Emmy Award for his coverage of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and a Lowell Thomas Broadcast Journalism Award in 1999.[2] His other listed recognitions include the Anti-Defamation League's Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize in 2000, an Ernie Pyle Journalism Award for military reporting in 2002, a Daniel Pearl Award in 2003, and a Journalist Pillar of Justice Award in 2004.[2]

His book-length works are Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook (Oxford University Press, 1985) and Territory of Lies (Harper & Row, 1989), the latter an account of the Pollard espionage affair.[11]

Blitzer's professional legacy rests on his sustained coverage of American politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Middle East affairs. His Persian Gulf War reporting brought him national attention, while his long-running CNN programs and interviews with presidents and senior diplomats made him a prominent figure in American television journalism.[2][8]

Blitzer has also spoken and reported extensively on the Holocaust in the context of his family history. David Blitzer recorded survivor testimony in the 1990s at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Dania Beach, Florida, and Wolf Blitzer later incorporated it into a CNN special about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[3] Blitzer attended the museum's official opening during the Clinton administration alongside Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel.[3]

In 2022 he hosted CNN's one-hour special "Never Again: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: A Tour With Wolf Blitzer" with museum director Sarah Bloomfield. The program drew on his father's testimony and those of other survivors to examine the Holocaust, Auschwitz, American responses to the Holocaust, and Holocaust denial.[3]

When antisemitic imagery — including a shirt reading "Camp Auschwitz" — was displayed during the January 2021 United States Capitol riot, Blitzer reflected on his parents' survival and said, "I'm happy that they're not seeing what's going on now in the United States."[9][10] He has argued that atrocities, massacres, and genocide should not be treated as routine "both sides" political stories, stating that once atrocities are occurring, "it's not a two-sided story."[3]

During a live CNN broadcast in December 2006, former Ku Klux Klan leader and Holocaust denier David Duke attacked Blitzer as an "Israeli agent" and accused him of being dishonest. Blitzer challenged Duke to explain his claims about "Jewish control," noting that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were not Jewish, and maintained his composure throughout the exchange.[22] The cited account offered no evidence for Duke's allegation. Blitzer had openly acknowledged his earlier employment at AIPAC, which had occurred approximately 25 years before the incident, and had occasionally mentioned it in his reporting.[22]

The most substantive dispute concerns the 1986 Pollard interview. A declassified CIA damage assessment stated that the interview violated Pollard's plea agreement because Pollard had not obtained advance Justice Department approval of the resulting text, and it attributed Pollard's life sentence in part to the interview.[23] Pollard's representatives countered that the interview could not have taken place inside a high-security federal prison with recording equipment without government permission, making an entirely unauthorized encounter implausible.[23] Blitzer later described the apparent approval he had received as "part of a calculated scheme."[15] The cited accounts therefore present a continuing dispute over the interview's authorization and significance to Pollard's sentence.[15][23]