Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic for The New York Times whose deep knowledge of Asia and Europe illuminated reporting from Tiananmen Square to the Bastille, and who wrote things as he saw them in 10 books driven by unflinching intellectual curiosity, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by pancreatic cancer, diagnosed less than eight weeks ago, his son, Elias Bernstein, said. Mr. Bernstein lived in Brooklyn.
Over more than two decades at The Times, Mr. Bernstein brought deep historical knowledge, a gracious writing style and a stubborn contrarian streak to subjects as various as the meaning of the French Revolution, the nature of Chinese authoritarianism, the “multitudinous strands” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, and the significance of parentheses in the politics of academic language.
Writing about the Danube in 2003 after a 1,750-mile journey along it, Mr. Bernstein observed: “Rivers are symbols. You can not think of the Mississippi without also thinking of the American drama of race. The Seine is Parisian elegance; the Rhine, German national identity. The Yellow River is China immemorial.”
As for the water on which he glided from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, it was “the river of exquisite stricken cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire,” the “Blue Danube Waltz” of Johann Strauss, the Holocaust and “the clanging into place of the Iron Curtain.”
His journalism had sweep, an elegiac sense of the tragic inherent in human affairs, and often a subtly crafted argumentation rooted in thorough on-the-ground reporting. Mr. Bernstein, who retained throughout his life something of the nervousness and capacity for wonder of a cub reporter, never tired of working hard.
“I frankly do not like books that start from the premise that matters are too complex to allow for any generalizations,” he wrote in “Fragile Glory,” his rich 1990 portrait of France, a country “someplace midway between a certain persistent dream and an immovable reality.” It was a nation, for Mr. Bernstein, that sought to “glow with the torch of civilization itself” even as it writhed over its “military and moral collapse in the face of the Nazis.”
If cleareyed on the ineluctability of suffering, Mr. Bernstein was also an optimist. The first-generation son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Belarus, he grew up on a chicken farm in rural Connecticut, where he learned to sort small, medium, large, extra large and jumbo eggs and was schooled in scrappy struggle.
Clothes were hand-me-downs; Hanukkah gifts, modest. The family rule was corn in the garden could not be picked until the water was boiling. At age 9, seated on his father’s lap, he would drive the farm pickup truck to collect eggs at the chicken coops.
From that experience he took a distaste for posturing, a suspicion of fashion, an impatience with taboos and a deep belief in American possibility. He believed in a fair shake for everyone, including his journalistic subjects. In his view, it was to America, as a postwar power in Asia and Europe, that fell the responsibility to safeguard and extend the freedom from which his family had benefited.
“A Jewish intellectual from a chicken farm, he never swerved from his attachment to what America should stand for,” the author Kati Marton said in an interview.
In a dispatch from Beijing, where he had been sent to report soon after the massacre of protesting students on the night of June 3-4, 1989, Mr. Bernstein quoted a saying used in Imperial China to persuade people to inform on traitors: “For the sake of the great cause, destroy your loved ones.”
He pivoted, with the assurance of a China scholar, to ask whether, in this light, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s brutal slaying of hundreds of students was “a product of 20th-century totalitarianism” or reflective of the country’s long tradition of harsh autocratic rule. As often with Mr. Bernstein, it was an attempt to reach beyond the news to the deeper historical currents of events.
His conclusion was that there was something new and singular in the government’s bald denial of what had happened and in its “entirely modern campaign of incessant propaganda” against the “thugs,” as the government called its victims.
“The notion here is that any opposition to the Government is not just wrong,” he wrote. “It is criminal, treasonous, counterrevolutionary, and those who led it deserve neither respect nor humane treatment.”
A Democrat of sometimes conservative views, Mr. Bernstein grappled with America’s ideological drift long before cancel culture, gender-norm wars and the current angry fracture of the country over diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
In a gently mocking “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine from 1990, he wrote of an academic conference he had attended that was advertised as “Rewriting the (Post)modern and (Post)colonialism,” and observed that the parentheses were a way of making readers think again about meanings “always taken for granted.”
“The parentheses were placed not only around words but also around parts of words,” he wrote. “There was one paper titled ‘Locating Un(re)presentable Desire: Narrational Transformations and Postmodern Man.’ Another was ‘It’s Not (Post) Until it’s Post(ed): (Post)modernism and the Terminological Endgames of Terrorism.’”
Drawing from that conference, he went on to note that “our basic values” were now commonly called “the dominant discourse,” or even “the totalizing discourse,” whose reputed ravages were most felt by “those outside the power structure.”
Attached to those increasingly contested basic American values, if aware of their need to evolve, he gave expression to his concerns in “Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future,” published in 1994. In that book, he argued that attempts to promote diversity had often stifled diversity, and through reporting across American boardrooms and classrooms, he chronicled what he saw as a treacherous, feel-good undermining of the nation’s meritocratic, can-do vision.
It was a book that won Mr. Bernstein more enemies than friends even as it presaged ideological fissures destined to grow. He never shrank from difficult subjects: In 2009, he published “The East, the West, and Sex: A History,” an exploration of the connection between sex and power told through the encounters of Western explorers, merchants and conquerors with Eastern cultures.
“He believed in truth, no matter where the chips fell,” said David Margolick, a journalist and author. “Nobody had handed him anything. His integrity was absolute. He wrote what he thought without looking over his shoulder.”
Richard Paul Bernstein was born in New York on May 5, 1944, the first of two children of Herbert and Clare (Brown) Bernstein. The family moved soon after to a poultry farm in East Haddam, Conn., after the Jewish Agricultural Society, an organization established to provide farm training to Eastern European immigrants, gave his father a loan.
Richard attended an Orthodox synagogue — “a rickety old building cantilevered over a gully near the soda shop,” in the words of his lifelong friend Donald Berwick — and graduated from Nathan Hale-Ray High School in nearby Moodus, before attending the University of Connecticut, where he earned a B.A. in history.
Wanderlust already had a grip on him. He went on to earn an M.A. at Harvard University in history and East Asian languages, a course chosen in part because it offered the possibility of moving to Taiwan to study Mandarin. There was born a passion for Asia that never left him. It led to jobs as a stringer and later correspondent in Beijing for Time magazine before he joined The Times in 1982, initially as a reporter covering metropolitan New York.
Mr. Bernstein later served as United Nations bureau chief, Paris bureau chief, national cultural correspondent, book critic and Berlin bureau chief before leaving The Times in 2006.
Judy Peritz, his younger sister, recalled how their father had given him a BB gun when he was 11. He would shoot at birds, and one day he hit one, and was appalled to see how the bird struggled and suffered from what he had done. “He never used the gun again,” she said.
A deep kindness accompanied Mr. Bernstein to the end. Although not religious, he joined a Torah study group late in life, intent on exploring the meaning of his Jewishness.
In addition to his son and sister, Mr. Bernstein is survived by his wife, Zhongmei Li, a renowned Chinese classical dancer and choreographer.
“We all know death comes,” he told Ms. Peritz just before he died. “I would have loved to have more, but now understand that I won’t. I accept that and am not afraid. I have lived a really wonderful and interesting life.”
