Roy Rowan ) 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 and Vietnam Wars. 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.
In 1946 he took a job running a fleet of trucks in central China for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration . 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, already something of a China Hand, covered all the major battles of the Chinese Communist Revolution 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 United States
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. As Life's Chicago bureau chief from 1955, Rowan covered the Little Rock school crisis and in 1957 he was the first writer to reach the "" in Plainfield, Wisconsin, which inspired 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 with Jimmy Hoffa to profile the Teamster boss for Life and in 1963 he led the magazine's coverage of the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy. Rowan's team managed to obtain the Zapruder film, which showed President Kennedy's death, and published frames from the film on Life's front page. Leaving Life in 1970 after 23 years working with the publication, Rowan founded his own publication, On the Sound, a magazine, covering the coast between New York City and Boston. The first in an 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 final foreign journalists evacuated from 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 take a job as one of Fortune magazine's senior writers, penning some sixty five major articles, which included an exclusive 15-page exposé on the top fifty Mafia leaders 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 . Rowan was a long-standing member of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China as well as president of the , the Overseas Press Club of America, and the Dutch Treat Club. Rowan died at a Greenwich, Connecticut hospital on 13 September 2016, at 96. No cause was given.
The book was translated into 10 languages, including Chinese.
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. A one-hour documentary based on the book and narrated by Kelsey Grammar, was aired on the Discovery Channel in 1999. A subsequent edition with President Obama and his dog, Bo, on the cover was published in 2009.
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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 at Hartwick College.
