Her Own Footsteps

Remembering her undergraduate days at Harvard, Nina Bernstein '70 recalls how determined she was "not to become a journalist."

Thirteen years later, Bernstein is back at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship, a prestigious one-year sabbatical for some of America's most promising journalists.

Bernstein explains her "disdain toward journalism" as "shadow-boxing with my inclinations." "I actually had to fight wanting to be a reporter since I was drawn to journalism all through growing up," says Bernstein.

New Bernstein realizes her aversion to making the news business her career was a "typical adolescent problem of needing to separate from my father's identity," says Bernstein. Her father, Lester Bernstein, worked for Time magazine, NBC News and finally served as managing editor and Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek from 1962 and 1981.

"I wanted to escape from my father's example and define myself differently," says Bernstein, adding that her reluctance to "follow in her father's footsteps involved the struggle of measuring up."

But even while at Harvard, Bernstein admits, she was "attracted to journalism." As a student, she worked on The Crimson photo board, "perhaps as a way of sneaking on without yet fully coming to terms with wanting to be a reporter."

Finally, after graduation, Bernstein used a few elippings of Crimson articles she had written (a book review written in French, an editorial on the Nixon Presidency, and a dance review) to secure a position with the Des Moines Register.

"After growing up in New York, and spending the summer in Paris, Des Moines seemed like the dark side of the moon," recalls Bernstein.

However she wrote "13 obituaries every morning and there learned the importance of being accurate for tear of enraging relatives of the corpses." A year of subbing on every beat and solid editorial criticism provided a "good apprenticeship" for Bernstein, who, unlike many of her colleagues, had no formal school training in journalism except for her work with the Crimson.

She left the Register to strike out as a free-lancer in San Francisco and stringer for Variety magazine, but soon accepted an ofter from the Milwaukee Journal to be a general assignment reporter.

Now, 11 years later, married to a University of Wisconsin professor, and with two young children (aged four and seven). Bernstein has returned to Harvard with a perspective altogether different from her undergraduate days. Now she relishes the role of a journalist, though she sees limitations in the profession.

"Journalism gives you a sense of being part of one's own history from the unvirailable position of the observery," she says. But rather than remaining passive onlookers, "Journalists have an obligation to be a voice for the powerless," Bernstein believes.

In Milwaukee, for example, she worked on a series of investigative reports examining "the in-justices and outright collusion of the city's power structure that were 'dumping' the mentally ill into run-down boarding homes." Sometimes social workers would send these people, barefoot in bathrobes, from nursing homes or mental health centers, because of some economic mandate from the state bureaucracy to lower health costs.

Reporting the plight of Milwaukee's mentally ill. Bernstein uncovered numerous cases of Medicaid fraud by psychotherapists and social works who were billing the government the services never performed. These accounts let its viveral prosocutions, and the formulicat of a point State City Mudioldd prosecutorial unit. This R. porting carned Bernsloin a second-place in the 1982 Pulitzer Prize category for local news over age.

Although Bernstein has met with success after deciding to disregard her initial hesitancy about journalism, she still question the ability of journalists to effect change.

"There's ghoulish side to journalism," she says, explaining that similar stories of human hardship recur, coming "back to haunt you." "Once a reporter has done a story, it's old news. The editor wants something different," adds Bernstein, who thinks reporters should have more opportunities to do follow-up stories as in-depth projects.

"Journalists show a superficial callousness about tragedy. You want to write sincerely about the down and out, yet your professional side exults at each new horror story you discover because if 'll make good story," says Bernstein. "I can remember being appalled that my father was hoping Winston Churchill would die [at a convenient press-run time] to put him on the cover of Newsweek."

At Harvard, Bernstein is taking courses in social justice and government. She says she is also interested in exploring how students on campus today are different from when she lived in Cambridge.

"They seem more conservative, more tentative in expressing themselves politically, and sometimes less apt to question what's wrong with society as a whole," she says, recalling that in her day "professors had to discipline students' flights of fancy, while now they have to prod them to use their imaginations and think more creatively."

But Bernstein sees herself as a continuing vocie of the '60s generation of protest, and refuses to admit she might have been just a "blip in history"--concluding. "If you're not angry when you're young, when are you going to be."