Mother Jones lost a major figure from its early history with the death, on March 13, of Jeffrey Klein. He had been in ill health for some years, suffering from a painful nerve disease. He was 77.
Jeffrey was part of the core group that started planning this magazine many months before we began publishing in 1976. At that early stage, there were a mere half-dozen of us, working out of a two-room office. Only 27, he was one of the youngest of our crew, his intense face under a thatch of red hair looking little different than it had when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University just a few years before. Undaunted by the prospect of persuading established writers to contribute to a magazine that didn’t yet even exist, he energetically barraged a wide array of them, both famous and unknown, by the means available at the time: letter, phone, and just showing up. On a trip to New York, one of the people he called on was the late Ted Solotaroff, a well-known book and literary magazine editor. Solotaroff was so impressed by Jeffrey’s zeal for tracking down writers that he said: “Now, I’m going out to lunch. Stay here and copy anything you want from my Rolodex.” Jeffrey’s determined outreach brought in, for our very first issue, a memoir that he edited, “Peking! Peking!” by Li-li Ch’en. It won the highest honor in our line of work, a National Magazine Award.
Soon after that, Jeffrey occupied the position of managing editor, which we then began rotating yearly. Feisty, provocative, and with a productive contrarian streak, he always pushed us to be both trenchant and unpredictable. Over the half-dozen years following Mother Jones’ launch, he brought in scores of pieces by other writers and wrote many of his own. His reporting unearthed ties between Richard V. Allen, at one point President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, and Robert Vesco, a shady investor who had fled the country to avoid prosecution. His other subjects ranged from a charismatic psychic to basketball star Bill Walton, porn mogul Larry Flynt, and Jewish refuseniks barred from leaving the Soviet Union. Soviet customs agents confiscated copies of the issue containing the latter piece at the Leningrad airport when we tried to bring them to some of the people he had written about.
One 1979 cover story Jeffrey wrote was about 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace, famous for his brash, aggressive questioning of people on camera. Wallace, however, was extremely skittish about being interviewed by Mother Jones and refused to talk. “When we persisted,” Jeffrey wrote, “he said repeatedly that he’d get back to us and then never did.” Jeffrey did not give up, and when Wallace gave the excuse that he was about to fly across the country, Jeffrey said, “Then I’ll book the seat next to you.” Jeffrey kept his tape recorder on for almost the whole trip from Los Angeles to New York. He asked Wallace, among other things, why he seemed so soft on Richard Nixon, whether his friendships with many of the wealthy and powerful gave him “an unconscious bias,” why 60 Minutes never talked about the inequities of American income distribution, and whether “invisible hand signals are passed from the top” about what the show should or shouldn’t cover.
Wallace must have been glad when the plane finally landed.
In 1992, after a stint at another magazine, Jeffrey returned for a second spell at Mother Jones to serve as its editor-in-chief. In the six years he held that role, he greatly widened MoJo’s reach, not least by launching the first website run by a general-interest magazine. He also established a popular annual feature, “The Mother Jones 400,” which had thumbnail portraits of the country’s biggest political donors—and details of what they expected in return for their money. In 1996, he published a special issue on the American tobacco industry, including an investigative story about its ties to that year’s Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Robert Dole. A frequent target of Klein and his reporters in those years—a choice that proved prescient, given his lasting influence on the Republican Party—was House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Between and after his stints at Mother Jones, Jeffrey was editor-in-chief of San Francisco Magazine and founded and edited West, the prize-winning Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News. He also founded a tech startup, worked in public television, taught journalism classes at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, and published a novel, The Black Hole Affair.
Jeffrey’s work as an editor and writer often focused on the injustices of the world. He also experienced and overcame many of his own. When he was 12, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. When he was in high school, living alone with his mother, she became bedridden from multiple sclerosis for the remaining few years of her life. And when he was 48, his first wife and the mother of his two children, Judith Weinstein Klein, died after a long struggle with breast cancer. He is survived by his wife, Claudia Brooks Klein, who cared for him in his last illness; his sister Carol White and brother Ken Klein; his sons, Jacob and Jonah Klein, and their wives, Liz and Ana; and four grandchildren. The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
