Donald Kirk has been covering Korean Peninsula issues for decades.
Old times passing
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By Donald Kirk
You know you’ve reached a certain age when people who had a lot to do with your “career” begin to drop off in increasing numbers. In recent days, two people who accounted for much of what I have done over many years have passed. Both of them had ties with Korea.
The first was Sam Jameson, the redoubtable Tokyo bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times for 25 years. Sam was one of my closest friends. I first met him when we were neophyte journos in Chicago in 1960 and succeeded him at his recommendation as Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune when he moved to the LA Times in 1971.
Sam and I maintained close contact over the decades ― the last time I saw him was a year and half ago at a talk I gave at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan regarding a book I'd written, “Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.”
Sam asked tough questions about the payoff that preceded the North-South summit of June 2000 and berated me afterward for not mentioning its enormity ― at least $500 million. I told him I forgot to say the number but had it in my book.
My last big conversation with Sam was two years ago at the International House in Tokyo. During three hours of chatting he told me he was working on one or two books from his storehouse of notes and knowledge. It's really too bad he never did just one book as he had much to say.
While focusing on Japan, Sam visited Korea many times and ranged to Southeast Asia, including Vietnam before “the fall" of Saigon in 1975. His insights and memories gave him stories at his fingertips, including invaluable material on the overthrow of Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk for a book I did in 1971.
Sam showed his sense of Korea in two pieces that he did at my request for “Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm,” the book that I co-edited with Choe Sang-hun six or seven years ago. He described in one piece how the LA Times had not stood behind him on a controversial story about Korea.
Sam also overflowed with bitterness about his demise with the paper, charging a know-it-all correspondent in his bureau with badmouthing him to editors. Sam’s career with the paper ended in a showdown with a foreign editor whose name, he noted, was similar to that of Simon Legree, the slave owner in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
I was just absorbing the news of Sam’s passing when I noticed the death of a very different kind of journalist ― the founder of USA Today, Al Neuharth.
I met Neuharth after joining the paper in its prototype phase in the summer of 1982 and then after leaving the paper eight years later. He reputedly ripped into subordinates, but I was too low on the totem pole to have been the target of his fury.
He had a way, though, of letting me know what he wanted. In the newsroom after the bombing in 1983 of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 U.S. military people died, he strolled over and said firmly, “Tell the story of the marines.” He didn’t want analysis, just news of them and their families.
Another time, after the U.S. invasion of Grenada, standing in the newsroom, he asked why there wasn’t a map locating Grenada. I had had a lot to do with the story and got the message.
I had my closest contact with Al on a gambit called JetCapade in which he flew to world capitals to meet heads of state, with whom he believed he was on equal terms. I was on the Asian portion. When he got to Hanoi, he wanted to see the top guy there too.
All the Vietnamese would give him was Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, whom I’d met and was fine. Al asked questions from a lengthy memo I’d written, then nodded at me to ask a question. Next day, he told me to go to Saigon, where he knew I’d spent much time during the Vietnam War.
I left USA Today in early 1991 after covering the Gulf War from Baghdad, staying there as U.S. missiles blasted the city. I ran into Al for the last time at the World Association of Newspapers in Korea in 2005 during which they took everyone to the folk village south of Seoul.
I was wondering how Al would respond to a show that struck me as standard tourist fare. My last memory of Al is of him watching intently, his lips in a slight smile, enjoying it as much as he ever enjoyed meeting world leaders. He was that kind of guy.
Columnist Donald Kirk worked as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1971 to 1976 and for USA Today, 1982-1990. He is reachable at kirkdon@yahoo.com.