My Favorite Gig
KIRK, DONALD
Letter from Seoul My Favorite Gig By Donald Kirk Seoul IN the EARLY 1960s, as a fledgling newspaper reporter and graduate student at the University of Chicago, I hardly had time for...
...We had our most severe set-to over "Calling the Shots in Korea" (July/August 2005), a pessimistic analysis of the failed attempts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons...
...Over the last 15 years I have worked on books in Seoul, and my reporting shifted to the confrontation on the Korean Peninsula...
...Hanoi's Le Duc Tho rejected Kissinger's offerto share the prize with him...
...Amid latter-day feuding between neoconservatives and Leftists, one voice in the wilderness dedicated to fairness and openness goes silent...
...My last article on the subject, "The Final Tragedy of Vietnam"—composed while I was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations— was published in the April 28,1975 issue as the house of cards was collapsing...
...I wrote about "money politics," Pope John Paul II's 1981 visit and the trans-Pacific trade wars...
...Such a response would have been disappointing, but nothing could have been sadder than the message from Mike informing me that The New Leader was closing up shop after 82 years...
...For a strange moment, I thought Mike was about to tell me he'd had his fill and was no longer interested in my work...
...officialdom that trumpeted North Vietnamese and Viet Cong losses, and the naysaying of the mainstream media that found it a military and propaganda triumph for the Communists...
...Jobs, editors and book projects might come and go...
...When I offered Mike yet another look at North Korea, on the basis of a five-day trip there this past October, I got an e-mail back with the subject line "End of the Line...
...Instinctively, whenever an idea for afull-length article occurred to me, I contacted the NL...
...The heat of the tense, threadbare capital was getting me down too...
...Mike, who never hesitated to tell me when he thought a piece fell short of expectations, told me he thought it was the best I had ever done for the NL...
...Such was the dramatic beginning of what would evolve into my longest running, oldest established, permanent floating gig...
...My few spare hours were spent thumbing through—if not reading—books on international relations, including Hans J. Morgenthau's hefty Politics Among Nations...
...When a Marine guard at the U. S. Embassy told me with a grin, "I hear they're kicking you out," I saluted him...
...I feel privileged to have participated in nearly half of the magazine's distinguished history...
...But occasionally my articles would appear with others in State Department and Pentagon media playbacks, piled in stacks in the Joint U. S. Public Affairs Office in the Rex Hotel...
...The main character in the article was a hotshot young Canadian officer who explained the futility of the mission...
...More recently, though, that was topped by "Baghdad Diary" (September/October 2004), a report written during a three-month stint on assignment for Institutional Investor and CBS Radio...
...Having come to apologize, he listened patiently as a Chinese diplomat screamed epithets at him...
...Crowds in the capital and other large cities were staging anti-Chinese riots, fueled by traditional hatreds and reaction against Sukarno's cozying up to Beijing as part of his anti-Western, proCommunist policy...
...Newspapers tended to quibble and quaver over what they wanted...
...Both ran pieces that allowed the kind of analysis I could not attempt in the 600-word reports I was filing for newspapers...
...Jakarta was now a happier place than the city I had left, although much of the rest of the country was writhing under a wave of anti-Communist slaughter...
...I did not get in touch with the NL, but leaving for Hong Kong in mid-1965, a year's fellowship at Columbia completed, Ikept it in mind as a place to contact...
...I still think the NL articles were the best...
...Datelines in the late 1980s and '90s reflected returns to Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, as well as new ventures in Hungary, Syria, Jordan, and post-Gulf War Kuwait (I had witnessed that conflict from Baghdad for USA Today...
...I could count on the NL to accept my view of events with a minimum of hassle...
...The New Leader may have been the least widely read of the publications I was writing for, yet it easily ranked as my favorite...
...Or, more accurately, the exploits of a couple of buccaneering American pilots flying for one of the weird cargo companies that set up shop in Phnom Penh to profiteer from the last throes of aid shipments for Lon Nol's dying regime...
...But wherever I went in Asia or the Middle East, the NL stuck with me, and I stuck with the NL...
...So I felt Sukarno did me a favor by turning on some reporters at Merdeka Palace and shouting, "To hell with your lies...
...Starting with a piece on the Tet Offensive in the issue of April 8, 1968,1 contributed regularly from Vietnam, pouring out articles in breaks from my daily reporting as Asia correspondent for the Washington Star...
...Enough time had elapsed to evaluate the offensive...
...My NL output decreased when I joined USA Today prior to its September 1982 start-up, but it bounced back once I began traveling overseas for the paper...
...Not that we were always in accord...
...It has been a long run, for the NL and for me...
...Mike, as I soon got to know him, welcomed my suggestion with a note calling for 2,000-2,500 words—a response that typified those 1 would receive from him over the years...
...Information Service reading room...
...I tried to counter both the glowing optimism of U.S...
...I had seen the NL on library racks and had a vague impression of it as a magazine of commentary, criticism and reporting from exotic datelines as well as Washington...
...the rest of the media were too busy running misleading stories about the prospects for peace to waste much time on a mechanism that was palpably flawed...
...I appreciated that comment, as I did his being receptive to my offerings over the past 40 years...
...And on one of his visits to Saigon, Milton Sachs, arespected specialist in Southeast Asian affairs and a political science professor at Brandeis University, told me he read my pieces in the NL and encouraged me to keep writing...
...All three of us—Tony Yared of the Associated Press, Ted Stannard of United Press International and I—ended up on a plane to Hong Kong...
...By then the holidays had passed and I was on my way back to Jakarta—a grim, unhappy place as Sukarno fended off the plotting generals led by Suharto, who would oust him a few months later...
...There was a lot to say...
...Returning to Hong Kong over Christmas, I thought about doing an article for The New Leader or the Reporter, a magazine I had contributed to while on a Fulbright in India...
...When I was leaving, he handed me a copy of a magazine with an article of his that he thought might interest me...
...The Communist Party of Indonesia aimed to stifle conservatives opposed to its influence over Sukarno, the bombastic, silver-tongued presidentfor-life...
...The first, "The ICCS' Impossible Mission" (June 11,1973), described the hopeless task of the International Commission for Control and Supervision set up under the terms of the hollow Paris peace agreement that nevertheless garnered Henry Kissinger a Nobel Peace Prize...
...It was the kind of article only the NL would print at great length...
...My next stop was Saigon, in late 1967...
...Ultimately Morgenthau's influence inclined me toward the NL...
...All correspondents out...
...I particularly remember how pleasant, slightly distracted and, at times, amusing he was while holding forth on peoples, regions and nations...
...Mike and I were particularly happy about a piece I did from Chongjin, "North Korea Woos the Capitalists" (May 4,1992), on the first of my three trips to the North...
...There I finally fired off my first pitch, copying the NL's address and the name of its editor, Myron Kolatch, from an issue in the U.S...
...Conservative Muslims were killing Communists far out of sight of Western journalists, but close enough for word to filter back through the villagers we interviewed...
...The second piece, "A Visit to Kompong Cham" (October 1, 1973), recounted my final trip to the pleasant Cambodian market town before it was encircled by Khmer Rouge forces...
...Two other pieces I wrote during that period stand out in my mind—and not simply because they formed chapters of my book Tell It to the Dead: Memories of a War...
...I can't say I recall the substance of the article, but I know the name of the magazine: The New Leader...
...During the decades that followed, my contributions to The New Leader were cyclical, rising when I was freelancing, declining if I took a full-time staff job...
...After due wrangling it appeared, and was bome out by the breakdown of six-party talks...
...It was still on my mind when I arrived in Jakarta a month after the coup of September 30,1965, that saw several generals stuffed down what was called the "crocodile hole...
...Shortly thereafter, I gravitated to the East Coast and the New York Post...
...One of my most vivid memories is that of Foreign Minister Adam Malik, a diminutive mild-mannered man, standing in the wreckage of the Chinese Embassy...
...Again The New Leader provided a berth for news and analysis I found rewarding in terms of my outlook and interests...
...The next spring, the Overseas Press Club gave me a citation for my magazine reporting from Indonesia: 10 pieces, five for the NL, three for the Reporfer and two forthe New York Times Magazine...
...My first NL piece, "Indonesia's Fragmented Revolution," datelined Hong Kong, appeared in the issue of March 14, 1966.1 was just preparing to go to Bangkok, where the pro-American Indonesian ambassador to Thailand—a participant in the great shadow game played by Sukarno's soon victorious rival, Suharto—had the authority to issue visas...
...Large magazines were incredibly fussy...
...One afternoon that masterwork spurred me to drop by the great man's office near the Midway...
...In 1978, for example, in the wake of 13 debilitating months cooped up in a cubicle as a writer at Time, I alighted to Japan, where I filed dispatches regularly as a correspondent for the Observer and numerous other papers...
...Whether or not what I wrote filtered up to policy-makers in Washington or Saigon, I don't know...
...Two days later it developed that Sukarno only had it in for "the entire American press corps," not the few others from European papers and news agencies...
...Veering off to the Philippines, I examined how Ferdinand Marcos had trampled democratic institutions under martial law...
...Before the Indonesian authorities in effect kicked me out for the second and final time, I had written four more NL articles, all with Jakarta datelines—and with the excitement of being able to say pretty much what I thought...
...I was able to travel freely from Sumatra down through Java to Bali, writing articles for the New York Times Magazine, the Reporter and The New Leader, along with dozens of stories for the Times, the Washington Star and two British papers, the Daily Telegraph and the Observer...
...Letter from Seoul My Favorite Gig By Donald Kirk Seoul IN the EARLY 1960s, as a fledgling newspaper reporter and graduate student at the University of Chicago, I hardly had time for anything beyond going to class, getting to work, and drinking beer at the Radio Grill down the steps from Michigan Avenue between the Tribune Tower and the offices of the Sun-Times...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
