.webp)
Fred Kempe is the president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. Since assuming leadership in 2007, he has overseen significant growth in the organization’s size and influence, expanding its global presence through regional and thematic centers focused on areas such as international security, energy, global trade, and next-generation leadership.
Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, Kempe spent more than twenty-five years at the Wall Street Journal as an award-winning editor and reporter. In New York, he served as assistant managing editor for international coverage and as a columnist. Earlier, he was the longest-serving editor and associate publisher of the Wall Street Journal Europe, overseeing editorial operations across Europe and the Middle East.
In 2002, The European Voice, a publication covering EU affairs, named Kempe one of the fifty most influential Europeans and one of the four leading journalists in Europe. During his tenure at the Wall Street Journal, he held several key reporting roles, including roving correspondent based in London, Vienna bureau chief covering Eastern Europe and East–West relations, chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, DC, and the paper’s first Berlin bureau chief following German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As a reporter, he covered major global developments, including the rise of Solidarity in Poland, increasing resistance to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and his summits with President Ronald Reagan, conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon during the 1980s, and the U.S. invasion of Panama. He also reported on German reunification and the collapse of Soviet communism.
Kempe is the author of four books. His most recent, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (2011), became both a New York Times and national bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages.
He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he participated in the International Fellows program at the School of International Affairs. He has received the Columbia Journalism School’s top alumni achievement award and the University of Utah’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In recognition of his contributions to strengthening the transatlantic alliance, Kempe has been honored by the presidents of Poland and Germany, as well as by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
