Donald Kaul

Who is Donald Kaul?

Donald Kaul is an American journalist and pundit, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1987 and 1999. Kaul retired after three decades writing opinion columns, mainly for the Des Moines Register, where he established his liberal and satirical style. Perhaps Kaul's greatest legacy is the Des Moines Register‘s annual, weeklong bike ride across Iowa, RAGBRAI, of which he is the co-founder. The idea for the ride began with a 1973 Kaul column and he launched it that year with John Karras, another Register writer.

Kaul came out of retirement in 2001 to write columns syndicated by OtherWords, a national non-profit editorial service. Kaul's OtherWords columns run primarily in the Midwest, including The Quad Cities Dispatch-Argus, The Mason City Globe Gazette, The Progressive Populist, and Insider Iowa.

In a January 2, 2013 Des Moines Register satirical essay posted shortly after the Newtown massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, Kaul called for the NRA to be declared a terrorist organization, for Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to be dragged behind a Chevy pickup truck until they saw "the light" about gun control, and for anyone who would not give up their firearms to be killed. After being criticized by those who took the column seriously, Kaul two days later published "Deploying Satire at My Own Risk," which clarified that the earlier essay had been satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and A Modest Proposal.