Early life and education

Born in San Francisco to refugee parents from Greece. His father, Antonios, was an underground guerrilla fighter against the Nazis on the island of Crete during WWII. He fought with Constantine Mitsotakis, who later became Prime Minister of Greece. Like his father, he was a blue-collar construction worker who maintains his Class A heavy equipment truck drivers license.

Kounalakis received a public education in the San Francisco Bay Area and received his Bachelor's degree in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He received his MSc in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Europe (1988-1989), and an International Journalism Graduate Fellow at the University of Southern California (1995-1996).

Career

Kounalakis worked as a foreign correspondent for NBC Radio and Mutual News in the USSR, based in Moscow from 1991-1992. He previously reported for Newsweek on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Albania. Newsweek also sent him to cover the early phase of the Yugoslav civil war. He went to Afghanistan and covered the “Holy War Without End” for The Los Angeles Times Magazine.

In 2002, The New York Times called him a “White Knight” for saving the venerable Washington Monthly magazine. Publisher Kounalakis and editor Paul Glastris have since rejuvenated the magazine, grown its readership, and increased its impact — making it a “progressive must-read” in Washington, DC, according to James Carville. Its expose of former education secretary William Bennett’s gambling problem brought early attention to the Kounalakis/Glastris team .

Service

Kounalakis serves on the Board of Visitors at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; Board of Advisors at Georgetown College and the Wilson Council at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the Vice Chairman of the Board of Advisors at the Southeast Europe Project at WWICS; he is a trustee of the World Affairs Council of Northern California; and formerly served as Chairman of Internews Network 2002-2004; Vice Chairman of the California State World Trade Commission 2001-2003; Board of Trustees of the Western Policy Center 2001-2005. In June 2003, he chaired a multinational reconstruction conference in Athens, Greece where Iraq's media laws were drafted.

Kounalakis and his wife, Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, have established two chairs in politics and democracy at Georgetown University and Stanford University

Marriage and children

He married Eleni Tsakopoulos in Istanbul in 2000. The couple has two sons, Neo and Eon. His wife currently serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary.

Books

• Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton (1993)
• Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism (with Drew Banks, 1999)
• Hope is a Tattered Flag: Voices of Reason and Change for the Post-Bush Era (June 2008)

Film

• The War Prayer (short film, 2007)