Michael Kofman,

Michael T. Kaufman, a former foreign correspondent, reporter and columnist for The New York Times who chronicled despotic regimes in Europe and Africa, the fall of Communism and the changing American scene for four decades, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 71. His death was caused by pancreatic cancer. A versatile writer of seven books and thousands of articles, Kaufman covered wars, revolutions, politics and America's turbulent 1960s. He also explored the foibles of raising children in a violent world, his father's years as a political prisoner in Poland and his family's escape from invading Nazis in World War II. Taking after his boyhood hero, Jack London, he traveled widely as a correspondent, interviewing kings, presidents, dictators and the Dalai Lama. He accompanied mercenaries in Rhodesia; covered wars in Angola, Zaire, Ethiopia and Afghanistan; talked his way through roadblocks; befriended an Israeli secret agent; was once arrested at gunpoint; and documented the approaching death of Communism in Poland. Newspapering was ideal for Kaufman. He was an insatiable schmoozer, loved to travel and wrote fast against a deadline. In 40 years with The Times, he was a typewriter-banging rewrite man, a metropolitan reporter, the newspaper's bureau chief in Africa, India, Canada and Poland, a deputy foreign editor, a correspondent in Albany and a columnist. Briefly in 1988 and 1989, and then regularly from 1992 to 1995, he wrote About New York, a twice-a-week column relating extraordinary tales of ordinary people: a crack addict transformed by the birth of a daughter, a Chinatown businessman opening a fortune-cookie factory, a gay couple celebrating 43 years together. He also wrote for The New York Times Magazine, notably a 1985 account of his 82-year-old father's return to Poland after 50 years in exile. For a decade after retiring in 1999, he wrote obituaries of world and national leaders. Kaufman's books included 'Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy' (1989), an examination of the country in its last years under the domination of the Soviet Union. He also wrote 'Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire' (2003), an authorized biography of the investor George Soros, and, with Bernard Gwertzman, 'The Collapse of Communism' (1991) and 'The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire' (1992).