Gordon Ackerman Biography

Gordon Ackerman is an American journalist, writer, author, and photographer. He began his career with the Albany, N.Y. Times-Union. He has lived and worked for most of his life in Europe, where he has reported and written for major American print and broadcast media, including Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek magazines, CBS News, ABC News, and UPI.

Gordon Ackerman Age

Ackerman was born in the year 1931. There is no specific month and date of when he was born. He is about 88 years old as of 2018.

Gordon Ackerman Family

Ackerman was born in Albany, N.Y., to E Ackerman, a feed and grain executive, and H Ackerman, a classical pianist. There is no more information regarding his family. Ackerman attended Albany Academy and later joined boys boarding school, the Fessenden School. After graduating from the Fessenden School he joined Boston University and later the University of Paris.

Gordon Ackerman Wife

There is no information regarding Gordon’s wife. There is no information if he was actually married or not. He is very secretive about his personal matters and prefers to keep them very private. He provides little information or no at all about his family. Ackerman has two children, and resides in upstate New York and divides his time between the U. S. and Europe.

Gordon Ackerman Career

Gordon began his career with the Albany, N.Y. Times-Union, but has lived and worked for most of his life in Europe. In Europe, he has reported and written for major American print and broadcast media, including Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek magazines, CBS News, ABC News, and UPI. Ackerman was Chief Paris Correspondent for the Westinghouse Broadcasting Corporation. This was before he joined the Paris Bureau of Time-Life as a correspondent and writer, in 1959.

He reported throughout Africa and Europe for leading weekly French magazine Paris-Match as well as all of the Time Inc. publications. Gordon worked briefly as an editor at People magazine in New York. In the 1950s and ‘60s, he reported major news events in Europe and North Africa. He became the first American newsman to arrive in Agadir, Morocco, on February 29, 1960, after the earthquake in which 30,000 people were killed and injured. He witnessed the street battles between French infantrymen and civilians in Algiers in 1961 that heralded the end of the Franco-Algerian War.

In the late 1980s, Gordon carried out reporting assignments for Pierre Salinger, European News Director of ABC News and former press secretary to President John F. Kennedy in Eastern Europe. In 1989, during an assignment for Pierre Salinger, Ackerman entered the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) posing as a university professor. He was arrested by the East German secret police, the Stasi, but was released after convincing the police that he was a close friend of East German chief of state Erich Honecker.

Ackerman continued reporting and secretively filmed massive public demonstrations in Leipzig and Berlin that preceded the collapse of the Communist government and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The motorcyclist Ackerman hired to smuggle them out of the country were intercepted and seized together with the films, probably by the Stasi, before reaching West Berlin. On the night of November 9, 1989, with East Germany falling rapidly into anarchy, Gordon and another correspondent became the first newsmen to reach the Brandenburg Gate as jubilant crowds of West and East Germans ripped down the first sections of the Wall and tearfully embraced.

Ackerman’s report on war has been included in a book collection edited by Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans, entitled The Violent Peace, published by Atheneum. In 1964 a collection of his short fiction, Eleven Stories, was published. His writing and reporting are in the permanent collection at the American Heritage Foundation and the University of Wyoming. Gordon’s art photography has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. They are also acquired by the Albany Institute of History and Art among others. His last novel, Raging Light, was published as an e-book on Amazon in September 2013.

Gordon Ackerman Raging Light

Raging light is Gordon’s last book. In the 1950s in Northeast America, six seniors at a private co-ed secondary school confront love, suffering, tragedy, manhood, fame and the whims of fate and fortune. Gordon Ackerman brings fresh insight, vision, compassion, and wit to a period, place and people seldom portrayed in contemporary American literature. Raging Light was published as an e-book on Amazon in September 2013.