Co-founding Mother Jones Klein was one of the journalists who founded
Mother Jones magazine in 1976, in the wake of the
Vietnamese War and Watergate. For its first issue, Klein found a memoir about growing up in Beijing by Li-li Ch'en that won a
National Magazine Award. In 1977, Klein became the magazine's second managing editor;
Adam Hochschild had been the first. When
Larry Flynt expressed an interest in distributing
Mother Jones, Klein used the opportunity to do a “Born Again Porn” profile of Flynt and
Hustler’s demographics, which were disclosed to be much broader than the presumed blue collar audience. He reported from Moscow about Jewish refuseniks barred from leaving the Soviet Union. His article “
Esalen Slides Off The Cliff” shook up that human potential retreat perched on the California coast by showing its co-founder being duped by a psychic. His story predicting what might happen during the first four years of a Reagan Administration contained a co-written sidebar exposing that Reagan's chief foreign policy adviser, Richard V. Allen, had been on the payroll of
Robert Vesco (then the world's largest swindler and a fugitive) at the same time that Allen was working in Nixon's White House. Allen was forced to resign from the campaign, but was appointed National Security Advisor after Reagan's landslide victory. Allen resigned a second time when other personal scandals came to light.
At the San Jose Mercury News After a stint as the editor-in-chief of
San Francisco magazine, Klein founded
West, the Sunday magazine of the
San Jose Mercury News, in 1982. The magazine sought to penetrate Silicon Valley. A satiric look at Valley's top powerbrokers provoked ire from the newspaper's publisher, Tony Ridder, and also led to the founding of the cheeky magazine
Upside. Susan Faludi began her book
Backlash as a series of articles for
West. While editing at the
Mercury-News, Klein also reported on the Pentagon's efforts, through its black budget, to dominate space. With Dan Stober, he co-wrote "The American Empire In Space: 'Star Wars' -- The Strategic Defense Initiative -- Has Become The Space Domination Initiative". He also wrote a thriller called
The Black Hole Affair based on his reporting; the novel was first serialized in the
Mercury-News.
Returning as editor-in-chief In fall 1992, Klein returned to
Mother Jones as editor-in-chief. He brought an intense focus on how money influenced Washington politics.
Mother Jones began posting its magazine content on the Internet in November 1993, the first general-interest magazine to do so. the only media to do so. The Ethics Committee ultimately recommended that Gingrich be reprimanded and forced to pay a $300,000 fine. On January 21, 1997, the full House voted overwhelmingly to accept the committee's recommendation, the first time in its 208-year history that the House disciplined its speaker for ethical wrongdoing.
Bob Dole and tobacco In 1996, Klein published a 40-page investigative package on the tobacco industry's attempt to roll back regulation by electing as president
Bob Dole. Frank Rich wrote about the
Mother Jones package in
The New York Times and highlighted Klein's claim that the 1996 presidential election was "The Tobacco Election". Dole was subsequently forced by reporters to defend his support by and for the tobacco industry. He stumbled, saying
nicotine was no more addictive than milk. Rather than appearing corrupt, Dole seemed out-of-touch and his image suffered.
Exposing the Republicans' image-maker In 1997, Klein accepted and fortified an investigative piece on Republican image-maker Donald Sipple, who had crafted character campaigns for Bob Dole, George Bush, George W. Bush, and Pete Wilson while trashing the personal reputations of their Democratic opponents, such as Bill Clinton, Ann Richards and Kathleen Brown. Sipple's attack ads mirrored the hidden past of a vindictive man who beat his first two wives. The story was originally written for
George magazine by staffer
Richard Blow, then rejected by
George editor-in-chief John Kennedy, Jr. under intense pressure from Sipple and advice from Kennedy's sister Caroline. When the exposé appeared in
Mother Jones, Sipple responded with a $12.6 million defamation suit, but both ex-wives vouched for the accuracy of the article. Sipple appealed all the way up to the California Supreme Court, where his suit was dismissed and Sipple was forced to pay
Mother Jones' court costs. All of these exposés brought the magazine and Klein into the full glare of the talk-show circuit. published during the 1997 holiday season was praised by columnists such as
The Washington Post’s
William Raspberry and sold well, but also led to Klein’s resignation from
Mother Jones because of the parent board’s displeasure.
Later work Klein subsequently taught journalism at
Stanford University and started a software company. He co-produced for
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer a seven-part series on China’s economy. The series won a 2006
Gerald Loeb Award, journalism’s top award for economics and business reporting, in the Television Enterprise category. With
Paolo Pontoniere, Klein authored pieces about secret trade-offs made by the U.S. prior to the Iraq War and about the mysterious deaths of two European telecom engineers immediately after they discovered sophisticated bugs planted in the hubs of their telecommunications systems. ==Criticism==