Jeffrey Bruce Klein

Jeffrey Bruce Klein (born January 15, 1948) is an investigative journalist who co-founded Mother Jones (magazine) in 1976.

For its first issue he found a piece that won a National Magazine Award. He forced the resignation of Ronald Reagan’s chief foreign policy advisor, Richard V. Allen, at the 1980 Republican National Convention. At the San Jose Mercury News from 1983-92, he investigated The Pentagon’s secret programs to dominate space. Susan Faludi began Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women while working for Klein there. Returning in the 1990s to be Mother Jones’ editor-in-chief, Klein directed exposes of Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, the top 400 political contributors in the U.S. and Donald Sipple, the Republican's star image-maker. The investigative series on Speaker Gingrich led to his unprecedented public reprimand by the United States House of Representatives and a $300,000 fine. Klein made Mother Jones the first general interest magazine to place its content on the Internet. In 2005, he co-produced for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer a series on China’s rising economy that won a Gerald Loeb Award.

Klein was born in the Hill Section of Scranton, Pennsylvania to Dr. Harold and Helen Klein. When Klein was 12, his father died of a heart attack on the golf course; his mother’s multiple sclerosis flared and she became bedridden. Klein attended Scranton Central High School and Columbia University. During his senior year at Columbia, he studied “the moral life in the process of revising itself” under Lionel Trilling, who was preparing to give the Norton lectures at Harvard the following year. Klein’s first published article, “A Cuban Journal,” appeared in the Winter 1970 Columbia Forum; it critiqued his experiences cutting sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba.

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