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Sack had also been a producer for Channel 2 here, a screenwriter, an actor and a writer for the TV show "That's Incredible." But he is best known as a war correspondent for Esquire for 38 years. From the magazine's release at Romenesko:
John Sack, a founder of literary journalism and a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, has died in San Francisco of complications from a transplant for myelodysplasia, a bone-marrow cancer. He was 74...Early in 1966, when America had little more than 100,000 troops in Vietnam, he resigned from CBS to be Esquire’s war correspondent there. At 33,000 words, the resulting article was and still is the longest ever published in Esquire and ran behind an all-black cover with the white inscription, "Oh My God -- We Hit a Little Girl."
Along with the works of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and Hunter Thompson, his article is considered one of the pioneer works of New Journalism, which is now often called literary journalism. Expanded into a book called M, the name of the Army company Mr. Sack lived with, it was reviewed as "great reportage" by The New York Times.
of LA Observed
As John Sack was a first cousin-once removed, I recall his youth. One comment, perhaps little known, is that he was the writer along with a group of Harvard undergraduates who decided to travel to South America to climb a mountain known as "The Butcher." The story, possibly his first, became so entitled.
Posted by: Paul Chessin at April 7, 2004 04:30 PM