Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk, based in Washington, first visited Seoul in 1972 as Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and has covered major events in Korea from the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in 1979 and the Kwangju revolt in 1980 to every presidential election since adoption of the “democracy constitution” in 1987.

From 1988 to 1994, he focused on economics and labor, writing Korean Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung, a critical study of Hyundai, Korea’s largest chaebol, and its founder. Back again in Seoul, he wrote Korean Crisis: Unraveling of the Miracle in the IMF Era, published in 2000. In recent years he has been working on Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine, published in October 2009.

'Living Dangerously'

After reporting from Indonesia in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” 1965-1966, Don based in Saigon and Hong Kong during the Vietnam War. He produced two books from that period, Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, 1971, and Tell it to the Dead, published in 1975, after the fall of the U.S.-backed regimes in Indochina, and again, updated and enlarged, in 1996. Two of his articles, "Who Wants To Be the Last American Killed in Vietnam?" (The New York Times Magazine, August 1971), and "I watched them saw him 3 days" (Chicago Tribune, July 1974), the story of a Khmer Rouge execution, appear in Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975, Library of America, NY.

Don has been a reporter for most of his life, beginning in school and college and then in Chicago and New York before moving on to Asia. Returning to the U.S. in 1982 after covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Don spent eight years at USA Today as an editor and correspondent in Washington and abroad from the paper’s start-up through the 1990-1991 Gulf War, which he witnessed from Baghdad. Don revisited Baghdad in the summer and fall, 2004, writing magazine articles and filing for CBS Radio.

Don focuses on the looming crisis on the Korean peninsula, where he previously spent six years as Seoul correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, also filing for The New York Times and CBS. He has written articles for such diverse magazines as Institutional Investor, The New Leader, National Review, The Nation, Soldier of Fortune, Kyoto Journal and Hemispheres and commentaries for The Asian Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post and Newsday.

Awards and Grants

In the 1960s and 1970s, Don wrote from Southeast Asia for The New York Times Magazine, The New Leader and The Reporter, among others, winning George Polk, Overseas Press Club and Edward Scott Beck awards and three OPC citations for articles in The New York Times Magazine from Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia. With the Chicago Sun-Times in the early '60s, he received the Chicago Newspaper Guild’s page-one award for a first-person account of a holdup.

Don was a Fulbright scholar, New Delhi, 1962-1963; Ford fellow, advanced international reporting, Columbia, 1964-1965; Edward R. Murrow fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, 1974-1975, at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School; visiting fellow, Southeast Asia program, Cornell, 1986-1988, and Fulbright senior scholar, Manila, 1995-1996, researching Looted: the Philippines After the Bases, 1998. A graduate of Princeton, he holds a master’s in international relations from the University of Chicago and the honorary degree of doctor of letters for "scholarly attainments and distinguished service" from the University of Maryland University College.

©CHANG SUNG HEE PHOTO

©DON KIRK PHOTO

©DON KIRK PHOTO