Michael Tyler Kaufman (March 23, 1938 – January 15, 2010) was an American author and journalist known for his work at The New York Times. He won the 1978 George Polk Award in foreign reporting for his coverage of Africa and was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Early life Kaufman was born in Paris as the only child of Polish Jewish refugees Adam and Pauline Kaufman; Pauline was a teacher and Adam was an economist. His father had been imprisoned in Poland for nine years as a communist revolutionary. In 1940, when the Nazis invaded France, the Kaufman family moved to Spain and in 1941 sailed from Lisbon to New York City. He grew up in Manhattan and earned money at age 13 by selling ice cream. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1954 and obtained his degree from City College in 1959. Career After graduating college, Kaufman taught school in Harlem but quit after a few months to become a copy boy at the Times in 1959. He was married to Rebecca in 1960 and the couple had two sons and a daughter. During his forty years at The New York Times, Kaufman worked as a foreign correspondent, reporter, and columnist. As a correspondent, he traveled the world and interviewed a number of prestigious individuals. Kaufman travelled widely as a newspaper correspondent, plying stories from presidents, kings, and not infrequently dictators. He once interviewed the Dalai Lama. He travelled with mercenaries in Rhodesia, and reported on the wars in Angola, Aire, Ethiopia, and Zaire. After his coverage of the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, much of his later career would center on Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly his well reviewed book on George Soros published in 2002, and his books on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, life in Poland, and the Fall of Communism. His nomadic and adventurous life as a foreign correspondent included talking his way through roadblocks, befriending an agent of Israel, surviving an arrest at gunpoint, and documenting the death of Communism in Poland. From 1975 to 1979, Kaufman covered the African continent, reporting on liberation movements, wars, and riots. He interviewed the dictators Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire and Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, winning a George Polk Award for his work. He reported from Poland from 1984 to 1988, during the waning years of