Jonathan M. Katz
Award-winning Journalist & Author
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Gangsters of Capitalism
- The Big Truck That Went By
- Smedley Butler: War Hero Who Turned Against War
- The Making and Breaking of America’s Empire
- How Imperialism Abroad Breeds Fascism At Home
- The Clintons’ Republic of Haiti
- A Gut Feeling: Uncovering the Source of an Epidemic
Biography
“Katz is a great storyteller who enmeshes the reader in a lively web of history, incident, and examples of humanity pushing through disaster, hard luck, iniquity, and triumph to muck it up all over again.”―J. Anthony Lukas Prize Jury
“One of America’s most important foreign correspondents” —Christopher Leonard
Jonathan Myerson Katz is a journalist and author who writes about politics, history, conflict, and disaster. Known for his fearless pursuit of truth and ability to connect seemingly disparate events across time and space, he is a sought-after commentator on domestic and global affairs.
Katz began his career as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Latin America, the Caribbean, as well as Israel and Palestine. From 2007 to 2011, he was the AP bureau chief in Haiti. The only full-time American correspondent when a catastrophic earthquake struck the country in January 2010, Katz provided crucial early reporting on the disaster. Months later, he broke the story that United Nations peacekeepers had caused and were covering up their role in a devastating post-quake cholera epidemic. His reporting on Haiti earned him the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism and other awards.
Since leaving the AP in 2012, Katz has contributed to numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s Press, 2022). Both books received wide critical acclaim and won awards, including the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award and being shortlisted for the biennial PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
Katz continues to write about international affairs, U.S. politics, and other social issues in his newsletter, The Racket. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, NPR, Democracy Now!, and other outlets.
Short Bio
Jonathan Myerson Katz is a journalist and author known for his fearless reporting on politics, history, conflict, and disaster. As the Associated Press bureau chief in Haiti from 2007 to 2011, he provided crucial coverage of the 2010 earthquake and exposed the UN’s role in a post-quake cholera epidemic, earning him the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism. Since leaving AP, Katz has contributed to major publications like the New York Times and the Guardian, and authored two award-winning books: The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (2013) and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (2022). He continues to analyze global and domestic issues through his newsletter, The Racket, and is a sought-after commentator on various media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.
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Publications
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire
Nonfiction, 2021
A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to global power—and how its legacies shape our world today—told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine.
Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went—serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I was a racketeer for capitalism.”
Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world—from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal—and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines’ actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.
The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
Nonfiction, 2013
“A top-notch account of Haiti’s recent history, including the January 2010 earthquake, from the only American reporter stationed in the country at the time …An eye-opening, trailblazing exposé.” ―Kirkus Reviews
Published to glowing reviews and awards, The Big Truck That Went By is a crucial, timely look at a signal failure of international aid. Jonathan M. Katz was the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti on January 12, 2010, when the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the island nation. In this visceral first-hand account, Katz takes readers inside the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and through the monumental–yet misbegotten–rescue effort that followed. More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a global response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But four years later the effort has foundered. Its most important promises-to rebuild safer cities, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters-remain unfulfilled. How did so much generosity amount to so little? What went wrong? In what a Miami Herald Op-Ed called “the most important written work to emerge from the rubble,” Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid “smarter.” Reporting alongside Bill Clinton, Wyclef Jean, Sean Penn, and Haiti’s leaders and people, Katz creates a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world’s most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti’s earthquake, but of the world we live in today.
Winner, Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award
Winner, Washington Office on Latin America/Duke Human Rights Book Award
Winner, J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
Finalist, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Finalist, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Finalist, New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
One of the best books of the year according to Amazon, Slate, The Christian Science Monitor & Kirkus Reviews, and a Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ Book
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Review: An imperialist repents in Gangsters of Capitalism – ABC News
• Not Every Concentration Camp is in Auschwitz by Jonathan M. Katz – Slate
• Who suffers when disasters strike? by Jonathan M. Katz – Washington Post
• What General Pershing Was Really Doing In the Philippines by Jonathan M. Katz – The Atlantic
• 4 Surrender in Toppling of Confederate Statue in North Carolina by Jonathan M. Katz – New York Times
• Protester Arrested in Toppling of Confederate Statue in Durham by Jonathan M. Katz – New York Times
• Review of The Big Truck That Went By — Boston Globe
• Review of The Big Truck That Went By — Christian Science Monitor
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “The Clinton’s Didn’t Screw up Haiti Alone. You Helped” – Slate
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “What Happened to North Carolina?” – The New York Times Magazine
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “In Exile” — New York Times Magazine
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “The Man Who Launched the GOP’s Civil War” —Politico Magazine
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “How Not to Report on an Earthquake” — New York Times Magazine
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “The Secretary General in His Labyrinth” — New Republic
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “The King and Queen of Haiti” — Politico Magazine
• Read Jonathan M. Katz’s “The Celebrity as Hero: When Sean Penn Fought a Phantom Epidemic” — Gawker
Listen to Audio
• Katz discusses Haiti’s complicated history with foreign aid – Marketplace
Selected Writings
Introduction
“Why Haiti?” Hillary Rodham Clinton asked in early 2010, speaking on behalf of a bewildered world. The earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince and much of southern Haiti had defied logic, imagination, even superstition. How did a magnitude 7.0 temblor—a huge release of energy, but not necessarily catastrophic—prove to be the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere? Why did an earthquake, of all calamities, strike at the heart of a nation already reeling from so many others? And why, three years after so many countries and ordinary people sent money and help, hasn’t Haiti gotten better?
I wrote this book in part to answer those questions. When the earthquake struck, I had been living in Haiti for two and a half years. I had already seen a lifetime’s worth of disasters, both political and natural. Two centuries of turmoil and foreign meddling had left a Haitian state so anemic it couldn’t even count how many citizens it had. Millions were packed in and around the nation’s capital, living in poorly made buildings stacked atop a fault line. People could not rely on police, a fire department, or schools. Even the rat-infested General Hospital charged so much for basic medicine that few Haitians could afford care. Nearly everything—water, gas for generators, hungry relatives from the countryside—was delivered by truck. Each day, big eighteen-wheelers rumbled down the narrow streets, shaking homes as they passed. When the shockwave surged through Port-au-Prince, just fifteen miles from the epicenter, many of us thought at first that it was a gwo machin, a big truck, going by.
I wanted to understand how people could endure not only the catastrophe that befell Haiti on January 12, 2010, but also the hardship and absurdity that followed.
