Donald Kirk

Who is Donald Kirk?

Donald Kirk is a veteran correspondent and noted author on conflict and crisis from Southeast Asia to the Middle East to Northeast Asia. Don has covered wars from Vietnam to Iraq, focusing on political, diplomatic, economic and social as well as military issues. He is also known for his reporting on North Korea, including the nuclear crisis, human rights and payoffs from South to North Korea preceding the June 2000 inter-Korean summit.

After several years as a metro reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Post, Don went to Asia as a correspondent in Indonesia in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” 1965–1966, including the fall of Sukarno and mass killings in Java and Bali. He covered Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, first for the old Washington Star and then for the Chicago Tribune, reporting on the Tet Offensive, the downfall of Prince Sihanouk and the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, and the Easter Offensive in Vietnam. He also wrote articles for The New York Times Magazine and two books before gravitating to northeast Asia.

Don was correspondent for The Observer in Japan and Korea in the late 1970s and 1980s, covering the assassination of President Park Chung-hee of Korea in 1979, the Gwangju revolt in 1980, and financial, diplomatic and political issues in Japan for the Observer and newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. He covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 from Beirut and Tel Aviv, then joined USA Today in August as the paper’s first world editor. For USA Today, he ranged from Europe to Korea, reporting on war in Lebanon, revolt in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the fall of Ceausescu in Rumania, the democracy revolt in Korea in 1987, the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing in 1988, and the Gulf War from Baghdad, including the U.S. bombing, in 1989 and 1990.