Behind 'An Eye for an Eye'

John Sack is one of America's most eminent literary journalists. His reporting over more than half a century, from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, has appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He has been a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, as well as CBS News bureau chief in Spain. He is the author of nine non-fiction books, including M, Lieutenant Calley: His Story, and Company C, as well as An Eye for an Eye (available from the IHR). The founding editor of Esquire magazine has compared his writing to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernst Hemingway.

He wrote a book, "An Eye for an Eye"  about  what happened in POW camps after WWII; and even though he is an eminent journalist, and the book was fact-checked by  many publishers and was accurate, he could not get it published. Here is a speech he gave about the book and how it finally came to be published.



"Three years ago I was scheduled to speak at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The speech was announced in this brochure and also on the Internet. But then the Museum canceled it.

For the next forty-five minutes, I'll say here what I'd planned to say at the Holocaust Museum, and then, just as I'd have done at the Museum, I'll stay here as long as you'd like, answering questions. The audience at the Museum would have been historians, mostly, and I'd have said something like ...

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me, thank you for listening to me. What I'm going to talk about happened fifty years ago. And for fifty years, no one, no historian, no one at all has spoken about it in public anywhere in the world. Not until now.

Now myself, I'm not an historian, I'm a reporter. And what I write is the raw material of history, something that historians will -- I hope -- someday make some sense of. I go places. I watch events. I listen to people. And then I tell stories. And I'll start by telling one now. A true story about a teenage girl."

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