Visionary NPR leader Kevin Klose, who presided over a golden era, has died

Former NPR President and CEO Kevin Klose died Wednesday at the age of 85. During his tenure, NPR received a multimillion-dollar gift from the late Joan Kroc that enabled the network to weather financial crises. Jacques Coughlin/Jacques Coughlin/NPR

Jacques Coughlin/Jacques Coughlin/NPR

Former NPR President and CEO Kevin Klose, a buoyant and transformative leader who helped to propel the public broadcaster into the top ranks of major U.S. networks, died Wednesday morning in his sleep from complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by WBUR CEO Margaret Low, a family friend and former leader of NPR's news and programming divisions.

Klose demonstrated a keen and personal understanding of the news mission at NPR's core. His shock of white hair bobbed with excitement as he spoke with reporters and editors in the corridors of the network's Washington, D.C. headquarters. He would leave voicemails and fire off emails in appreciation for specific stories. And he was a champion for the central role international news played in NPR's identity.

"Long before it was on the tips of everyone's tongue, Kevin talked about the importance of quality journalism in a healthy democracy," Low said Wednesday.

The job encompassed enormous challenges. It required a vision and strategy for the network, the skills to manage fractious internal divisions and relations with the hundreds of independently owned public radio stations that air NPR's shows. It also demanded a drive to elevate its journalism to the ranks of its commercial and better-financed peers, and a deft touch in raising money to keep it in the black.

"There used to be a belief in some quarters that the job of president of NPR was too large to handle," says the former All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, "except for the example of Kevin Klose."

The network expanded significantly under his leadership, a period of calm after a history of turbulent internal struggles. In the early 1980s, the network stood on the verge of bankruptcy and subsequent leaders were forced to deal with the aftershocks.

Klose professionalized the leadership structure and established more competitive pay for the networks' hosts. Klose also encouraged creativity and experimentation seeking to reach new audiences. NPR introduced Day to Day with Slate magazine, The Tavis Smiley Show, and StoryCorps segments on Morning Edition, among other ventures.

Klose may have left his greatest mark by ensuring the network's financial solvency.

At the urging of a top fundraising official at KPBS, the public broadcaster in San Diego, Klose spent years cultivating a relationship and, ultimately, a friendship with the late Joan B. Kroc, a philanthropist and the widow of McDonald's magnate Ray Kroc.

Over a series of meals, conversations and gifts, they spoke of a shared love of international news, NPR, and the institutions that make up civil society. Asked by an adviser of Kroc, former McDonald's executive Dick Starmann, to think broadly about what he could do with some extra funds, Klose explained what donors could receive for $25,000. Starmann kept urging Klose to think bigger.

Kroc sent Klose a holiday card one year that included a check for the network for $500,000. He was touched and impressed, assuming that would be the weight of her generosity.

As she declined in health, Kroc held a celebratory lunch at her home in California. Klose gave her a lacquered Russian box, a memento of his time as a Moscow bureau chief at The Washington Post earlier in his career.

Kroc's 2003 bequest was valued at more than $200 million at the time. It led to a major NPR presence in Southern California, new reporting positions, expansion of foreign coverage and an endowment that allowed NPR to weather a series of financial crises and political storms.

Klose arrived at NPR in December 1998 as its sixth permanent president after a distinguished career as a national and foreign correspondent and a senior editor at the Post. He also served as the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the government-funded international broadcaster that serves audiences in Russia and 27 countries, largely in Eastern Europe, central Asia, and the Middle East.

After NPR, Klose went on to become dean of the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He also returned to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for two years after a shaky stretch for the government-funded network.

Former NPR host Robert Siegel, shown at the Republican National Convention in 2008. Dan Young/NPR

Dan Young/NPR

A romantic about the appeal of reporting, Klose was a clear-eyed realist about the stakes.

Among the topics he focused on: the role of dissidents advocating for greater freedom under the repressive Soviet regime. Klose warned a dissident labor leader he could be subject to abuse by the state if he went on the record about the safety and health dangers coal miners were subject to there.

The labor leader, Alexei Nikitin, told him that it was too important and told Klose to report on it anyway, the journalist recounted in later writing and conversations. Nikitin was drugged and brutalized by his captors in the Soviet psychiatric prisons.

Klose drew upon that expertise in 2000, when he arranged for an hour-long, live call-in show hosted by Siegel from NPR's small New York bureau with the newly elected President Vladimir Putin. At the time, the future autocrat was seen as a potential reformer.

"It was a delight to have someone so knowledgeable in the control room signaling his approval at key moments of the interview," Siegel recalled Wednesday.

Putin's security staffers complained about the quality of the men's room serving the bureau. The network later established a new, vastly upgraded bureau with major studios in New York's Bryant Park, thanks in part to the Kroc funds.

Klose's family intends to create the Kevin Klose Memorial Fund for Independent Journalism.

Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by NPR Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.