IEEE Spectrum February, 2014 - 12

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conflicting demands of morality and loyalty were frequent subjects.
"An employed engineer is sometimes drawn between the purely
moral thing to do, and what management would have him do,"
he says. Under Christiansen, staff editors (full disclosure: For nine
happy years, I was one of them) were encouraged to pursue newsy
and controversial topics, to follow them wherever they led, and to
dig deeper than the mainstream press into the technical details. We
were pushed to investigate failures-the bigger the better-and to
point fingers and assign blame. And we had to do our homework:
Don brought in a copy consultant, a crotchety, old-time newsman
named Richard Haitch, who pounded
us if we hadn't.
Under that formula, great stories-
In a world
and journalism awards-soon started
growing more
piling up. In 1979, Spectrum explained
turbulent,
to the world exactly what caused the
complex,
partial meltdown in a reactor core at
and hostile,
the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor
he relied
in Pennsylvania. In 1982, just after the
on ethics,
war in the Falklands, we made a wideprofession-
ranging assessment of rapidly advancalism, and
ing military technologies. In 1985, the
his readers'
magazine unraveled the chain of events
interests
that led inexorably to the breakup of
AT&T and correctly predicted what it
would mean for the future of communications. And in 1992, we
revealed how Iraq tried to build an atomic bomb, and how the
discovery of that clandestine effort led to new ideas about safeguarding nuclear weaponry. All four of those investigations won
National Magazine Awards, putting Spectrum among the very few-
count 'em on one hand-association magazines ever to win the
awards repeatedly.
Today, Christiansen writes the popular Backscatter column for
Today's Engineer, the publication of the IEEE-USA, the IEEE's advocacy group for U.S. engineers. He writes about pretty much whatever he wants, but many columns draw on his first-hand exposure
to some of the great events and people during an amazing time in
technology. He hasn't lost his passion for professional concerns: For
several years he has organized a seminar on engineering ethics for
the Long Island, N.Y., IEEE section, of which he is an active member.
In his final column as Spectrum's editor, Don wrote: "Spectrum
has been criticized for publishing case histories or company profiles complete with the warts that prove engineering designs or
management decisions are not always perfect and on occasion are
outright disasters. No surprise, the critics were usually those whose
oxen were being gored, and occasionally IEEE leaders who feared
withdrawal of support for IEEE activities by the corporations under scrutiny. But our readers always responded enthusiastically to
articles probing 'what went wrong,' and these continue as staples."
It was classic Don. In a world growing more turbulent, complex,
and even hostile, he navigated by relying on ethics, professionalism,
and, most of all, his readers' interests. And in so doing, he showed
many of us the way, too. -Glenn Zor pette

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2014