Roy Rowan

Roy Rowan (February 1, 1920 - September 13, 2016) was an American foreign correspondent, editor, and author.

He reported on the 1949 revolution that led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China, as well as the Korean War and Vietnam War. Rowan worked for Time-Life for 23 years and from late 1952 to 1970 he was Life magazine's assistant managing editor in charge of news.

Early life and war service

Born in New York City on February 1, 1920, Roy Rowan graduated from Dartmouth College in 1941 and a year later received his MBA from Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School. Drafted into the U.S. Army as a private soldier in May 1942, Rowan served in Tunisia, New Guinea and the Philippines, winning a Bronze Star and finishing the war as a major.

China and South East Asia

In 1946 he took a job running a fleet of trucks in central China for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) . With the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists erupting around him, he delivered food, clothing, and farm equipment to villages recovering from the Japanese Occupation, and contributed freelance articles and photographs to U.S. publications.

Hired by Time-Life magazine in 1947 and paired with photographer Jack Birns, Rowan covered all the major battles of the Chinese Revolutionary War by hitching rides with General Claire Chennault’s former Flying Tigers, hired to airlift military supplies for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops. Rowan and Birns were the only foreign journalists in Manchuria when the Communists conquered the province in 1948.

Struck down by a bout of typhoid and jaundice, Rowan recovered to see Chairman Mao's troops enter Shanghai in May 1949 before being sent to cover the Malayan insurgency and the Korean War.

Europe and the U.S.A.

In 1951 Rowan began reporting on the Cold War in Europe. A story he tracked down in Yugoslavia about a mother’s fight to win back her son kidnapped as a baby by a German SS soldier during World War II was made into a movie called "Divided Heart” by the British film mogul, J. Arthur Rank.

In 1952, after proposing by trans-Atlantic telephone, Rowan married Helen Rounds, a Life picture researcher from Birmingham, Michigan. The couple went on to have four sons. From 1955 as Chicago bureau chief for Life, Rowan covered the Little Rock school crisis and in 1957 was the first writer to reach the "House of Horrors" in Plainfield, Wisconsin, which became the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's movie, 'Psycho'.

In 1959, while still based in Chicago as Life's assistant managing editor in charge of news, Rowan spent a month travelling with Jimmy Hoffa for a profile of the Teamster boss in Life and in 1963 he led the magazine's coverage of the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy.

Leaving Life in 1970 after 23 years working with the publication, Rowan founded his own magazine, On the Sound, a magazine, covering the coastal area from New York City to Boston. The first in a intended series of regional waterfront publications, two years later it was followed by On the Shore, a magazine for the Chesapeake Bay area. In 1972 Universal Publishing Corporation acquired the two magazines and Time rehired Rowan to return as Hong Kong bureau chief. In 1973 during the Vietnam War, Rowan was one of the few journalists the North Vietnamese government invited to inspect the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison that housed American Prisoners of War. On April 30, 1975 Rowan was one of the last journalists to leave Saigon by helicopter.

Rowan was friends with President Gerald Ford and in 1975 interviewed the then-sitting President for his book on the Mayaguez crisis. In 1977 Rowan returned to the U.S. to join Fortune magazine as a senior writer, penning some 65 major articles, including an exclusive 15-page expose on the top fifty Mafia bosses in America, before resigning in 1980 to freelance write and author books. In 1990 he disguised himself as a homeless man and spent two weeks on the streets of New York for a ten-page article in People magazine.

In 1974, Rowan was diagnosed with a lethal form of melanoma, requiring radical surgery. Hospitalized for two weeks, he wrote a 6,000-word article about how he thought positive thinking could enhance his immune system. He later turned this into his book Never too late.

Rowan was a long-standing member of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (now located in Hong Kong) and a past president of the Overseas Press Club of America, the Time-Life Alumni Society, and the Dutch Treat Club.

Awards

In 1995 Rowan was awarded an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Hartwick College. In 2006 he received the Henry R. Luce Award for lifetime achievement in journalism. The Overseas Press Club Foundation's Roy Rowan Scholarship is named in his honour.

Publications and Books

• The Four Days of Mayaguez (W.W. Norton, 1975).
• The Intuitive Manager (Little, Brown 1986) The book was translated into 10 languages, including Chinese.
• Powerful People (Carroll & Graf 1996).
• First Dogs: American Presidents and Their Best Friends (Algonquin 1997). A one-hour documentary based on the book and narrated by Kelsey Grammar, was aired on the Discovery Channel in 1999. A second edition with Bo and President Obama on the cover was published in 2009.
• Surfcaster’s Quest (The Lyons Press 1999).
• Solomon Starbucks Striper (Book Nook Press 2003).
• Chasing the Dragon (The Lyons Press 2004).
• Throwing Bullets (Taylor Trade Publishing 2006).
• Never Too Late (The Lyons Press 2011).
• Rowan wrote a tenth book, 'Connections: American Business and the Mob' for Little, Brown. Although never published due to a publishing dispute, the manuscript is stored with Rowan's papers and archives in the Paul J. Cooper archives at Hartwick College.