Nicholas Kristof: We had done a lot of interviews with Chinese, and the period before Tiananmen was just an unbelievable time to be a journalist in China, because it was becoming more open. We were able to develop very good friendships with quite senior people. I remember at one point, in fact, interviewing a high-level advisor, and his next appointment — after we had lunch — his next appointment was in Zhongnanhai, which is the compound for the leaders. He didn’t have a vehicle, so I said, “Do you want me to take you?” And what do you know, I was able actually to drive him right in the compound, right into Zhongnanhai, with me as a driver, me with a foreign car. We look back on the period of openness, when we had a lot of friends. They were typically Communist party reformers or in the Communist party apparatus, and that became very, very useful then, a few months later, when the crackdown came and we had channels to find out what was going on.

Nicholas Kristof: When the demonstrations began, there was a lot of giddy expectation in the West that if you’ve got a million students in the streets that the people will prevail. “The people united will never be defeated” kind of thing. And in fact, I think any student of Chinese history knew that the people united are often defeated, and that courage and integrity are no match for AK-47s. And so we didn’t share (that) entirely. We hoped for the best, we hoped for a peaceful outcome, but we also were prepared for a bloody dénouement, and indeed our sources had told us that was what was going to happen.

So we were expecting bloodshed, or at least thought it was a strong possibility, and then I remember the night of June 3rd, there had been particularly ominous rumblings that day that things were afoot. And at about ten p.m., suddenly a bunch of people started calling that troops are moving in and they’re opening fire. And so there were a bunch of roadblocks on the roads, set up by the protesters so tanks — soldiers — could not just come in. I couldn’t drive there, so I took my bicycle and bicycled like mad to Tiananmen Square and parked my bike there, under the Mao portrait, under the Chairman Mao portrait. And it was just about when the soldiers were arriving from the other direction, and they opened fire on the crowd that I was in. So I was pushed back, left my bike there, and next time, weeks later when the square was opened up, there was a tank sitting right where my bike had been. I stayed with the crowd for several hours. We were being pushed back. The crowd would be pushed back, and they’d get very angry, and they’d start to go forward a little bit, and kids would start throwing stones, and the troops would open fire again. And then there’d be a lull, and then they would go forward. I remember trying always to stay back from the very front of the crowd so that there’d be other people that would absorb the bullets, but also then realizing at one point that I was a few inches taller than the average Chinese in front of me, so that a crucial part of me was actually exposed in it. After that I kept lower.

There had been a big discussion, and there still is, about the propriety of democracy in a developing country. Are people ready for it? If they’re illiterate, then can they really make the decisions necessary in a democracy? And it’s obviously a valid question to think about, but that night, the real heroes of it weren’t the university students, the teachers. They were the uneducated, often illiterate peasants who were the rickshaw drivers. Whenever the troops opened fire, and we would all run back and run away, then these rickshaw drivers would, with incredible courage, go out and pedal their little bicycle rickshaws out toward the soldiers, into this no-man’s land. Pick up the bodies of the kids who’d been killed or injured, put them on the back of their rickshaws, and then drive back toward the hospitals. It was an unbelievable display of courage, and if you’d asked them what is democracy, they certainly couldn’t have given you an elegant definition of it, but they were risking their lives for it. And I’ve never forgotten that display of courage, and I think there’s a lot for us all to learn from that the next time we sort of paternalistically say that, “Well, people may not quite be ready for democracy.”

The next day we sneaked into the hospital. The soldiers had ringed the hospital, but some friendly doctors smuggled me in through an underground tunnel from a nearby building, and not only were all the beds filled, but the aisles were full of kids who’d been shot. I talked to them, and it was clear that some of them were people who had taken a great risk. They had been in the front of the crowd. But there were an awful lot of them who had taken a very minor risk. I mean, they were taking risks comparable to those I had taken, or even lesser risks, but their luck had run out, and that was scary, to talk to people who had done exactly what I’d done and their number had come up. Being in that hospital corridor, stained with blood, in general it was a difficult time, and then also, a lot of our friends were imprisoned, were fleeing the country.

Our own most difficult crisis came when we had — there was a young man called Liu Xiang, who had helped us cover Tsinghua University. He was a student, and he had once registered us in the more open time to get into Tsinghua. And afterward, there he was, in this crackdown that got him into trouble. He was interrogated regularly about it. Finally he thought he was about to be arrested, and he fled. He ended up being imprisoned and he escaped from prison and came back to Beijing and asked for our help. Sheryl and I just agonized over that. One thing that is pretty clear in journalistic ethics is that you don’t help an escaped felon leave the country. And if we did that, we would be not only breaking Chinese law, we’d be also risking the closure of the New York Times bureau. We knew we couldn’t ask our editors for advice, because: a) the phone lines were tapped, but b), they could never endorse us risking the closure of the New York Times bureau. On the other hand, here’s a 19-year-old kid who was in trouble because he had helped us and the New York Times readers. If we didn’t help him, he was going to be caught at some point, and who knows what would happen to him. We just agonized over our moral responsibilities there. It was also a little bit complicated, because we worried that this might be an effort to set us up. It was a time when the government didn’t like my reporting and appeared to be trying to kick us out of the country, and it occurred to us that they might have let him out of prison so that he would then compromise us, catch us breaking the law, and then kick us out of the country. It was an immensely difficult decision, but we finally decided we just had to help him. We helped him, in a way with as few fingerprints as we possibly could. He was able to escape to Hong Kong, and I flew down the next day and helped him get to the States. He is now in the U.S. It was enormously unprofessional and yet absolutely the right thing to do.

I remember there was a man who contacted me; he was involved in the defense establishment. And one of the stories that I covered very aggressively was Chinese military sales, missile sales. He had photos and copies of contracts and other data showing sales by China of certain long-range missiles to Pakistan, which China had denied were taking place. He had all the goods on it, and he wanted money for these materials. One of the principles of journalism is you don’t pay for material. So we met many times, and I was trying to convince him to give me the material free, and he was trying to convince me to pay for it. But one of the things you do as a journalist, you try to build a rapport with people, so I would talk about his kids and my kids. He had a wife and a son, a small son. He had a wife and a small son, and he was doing this so that his son would have a little more money and have better toys and have a better future. And it really nagged at me. Finally, I remember at our last meeting, I wasn’t trying to get these materials out of him any more, because I knew that if I published my story that there was a real risk that somehow the source would be tracked down and that he’d be executed. That’s just how it would end. So I was telling him, “Just go home. Go back. Forget about this. Don’t try to sell it to the U.S. Embassy or anybody else. Just go home and forget about it.” It was a very non-journalistic thing to do, but I really didn’t — having made that bond with him for my own benefit — I didn’t want to think about that kid growing up without a father.

Nicholas Kristof: Journalistic ethics often don’t work in the real world. They’re important principles, but there are times when principles just don’t work. For example, you should obey the law, but not if that is going to lead to the execution of somebody who’s helped you. One of the principles of journalism is you don’t lie. You never lie. You’re in the truth business. In the Congo, I was once caught by a Tutsi leader who was busy massacring Hutu. I shouldn’t have been there. I was very worried about my own safety, and I lied through my teeth to this guy.  I told him that his commander, General Kabila, had authorized me to be there and sent his greetings. Well, this commander didn’t believe a word of it. Why would the commander send me into an area where he’s busy exterminating one tribe? But he couldn’t reach his commander on the radio, and didn’t quite know what to do. So finally, after about 45 minutes or an hour, he let me go. Well, it was at some level utterly inappropriate to lie. On the other hand, if you’re trying to save your own life or somebody else’s, absolutely. Lie.