Veteran journalist made his mark across the globe
By Richard Pyle
Associated Press
Born in a Japanese fishing village just after his refugee family
landed there in a desperate 1919 escape from Russia’s Bolshevik
revolution, Roy Essoyan arrived in the Soviet Union nearly four
decades later as an American journalist.
The foreign ministry called it `a rude violation of Soviet
censorship,’ but Essoyan had exposed what became known in diplomatic
parlance as the `Sino-Soviet split’ – and earned himself a one-way
ticket out of Moscow.But after three years of hobnobbing with Premier
Nikita Khrushchev and other communist leaders, the Associated Press
reporter’s Cold War adventure ended abruptly. In 1958 he was expelled
for reporting that a serious breach had developed between the USSR
and Mao Zedong’s China.
From Hong Kong, a pulsating world away from the dreary Soviet
capital, Essoyan continued a career that took him around the globe,
with stops in Cairo, Beirut and finally Tokyo.
In 1985 he retired to Hawaii, where he died Thursday at age 92.
Star-Advertiser writer Susan Essoyan said her father wrapped up his
turbulent, exciting life with gratitude.
`As he was slipping away from this world, his last words seem so
fitting. They were, `Thank you very much.”
BORN KAREKIN Essoyan, he was the youngest child of Armenian parents
who, in fleeing from Vladivostok as the communist-led upheaval
gripped Russia, became part of that ethnic nationality’s 20th-century
diaspora.
Stateless when they reached the coastal fishing town of Tsuruga,
where Roy was born, the family found Japan welcoming to foreigners –
but destined to become less so as war-fevered militarist factions
gained influence and power.
After starting a new life in the city of Kobe, the Essoyans moved in
1932 to Shanghai.
Roy Essoyan had aspired to be a journalist even before graduating
from Shanghai’s Public & Thomas Hanbury School in 1936. `I always
wanted to write,’ he said in a 2002 interview. `I thought I had a
flair with things like essays and whatnot.’
When Shanghai’s English-language newspapers refused to hire him as a
cub reporter, the 17-year-old shipped out on a Danish freighter, the
Peter Maersk, and spent the next year and a half at sea.
Returning to Shanghai in 1939, Essoyan and a friend teamed up to
publish small newsmagazines, and he was working as an editor for the
English-language Shanghai Times when World War II finally reached
Asia in late 1941, trapping many foreigners in China.
Essoyan had been married on Dec. 5, 1941, and when the newspaper
called him to work on Dec. 8, saying war had begun, he hung up the
phone. `I thought they were being funny,’ he recalled. `And sure
enough, I went out on the street, and Japanese soldiers were
everywhere.’
As the conflict ended in 1945, Essoyan, then 26, got a $90-a-month
job with the AP in Shanghai, and impressed his boss enough to be
offered a visa and assignment to Hawaii. He became a U.S. citizen and
burnished his English, his third language after Russian and Japanese.
He also lost his wife, Sadie, and a son, Daniel, to illness.
In 1953 he married Betsey Biggs, a reporter for the Honolulu Star-
Bulletin. He is survived by Biggs; daughters Susan and Catherine; two
sons, David and Stephen; and nine grandchildren.
After a steady news diet of Hawaiian volcanoes and VIP visits to the
islands, the Russian-speaking Essoyan was tapped in 1955 – the height
of the Cold War – to join AP’s Moscow bureau.
In 1958 he slipped past the Soviet censors a `news analysis’ saying
Khrushchev and Mao Zedong were secretly but sharply at odds over
Mao’s refusal to agree to an international summit meeting unless his
communist regime replaced Nationalist China as Beijing’s representative.
He was banished from Moscow, but during a visit to Indonesia years
later, Khrushchev spotted a familiar face – Essoyan’s – among the
press and, to the dismay of other reporters, invited the American to
join him for a private talk.
As they chatted in Russian, Khrushchev made a sneering comment about
Essoyan’s baseball cap: `Why do you wear those silly beanies?’
Essoyan responded by playfully sticking the cap on the Soviet
leader’s head – a moment captured by photographers.
Based in Hong Kong after leaving Moscow, Essoyan helped the AP cover
the early days of the Vietnam War, accompanying South Vietnamese
troops and their U.S. advisers on helicopter-borne operations.
After a brief stint in Cairo, Essoyan was named the AP’s chief of
Middle East operations in Beirut in 1965 and became its chief of
North Asia services, based in Tokyo, in 1973 – coming full circle to
the land of his birth.
Colleagues admired Essoyan as a plain-speaking, old-school
professional with a lively sense of humor but always ready to battle
with editors in New York, where the news cooperative is
headquartered, when he deemed it necessary.
Jim Becker, an AP veteran who worked closely with Essoyan in Moscow,
Cairo, Beirut, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Hawaii, described his colleague
as a fascinating and wonderful man with a wealth of experience.
The two worked together as the only staff of Hawaii’s AP bureau in
the ’50s and covered its run up to statehood, and by coincidence both
wound up retiring in the Aloha State, Becker said.
`He was a gentleman,’ Becker, 85, said. `He never did a mean or
dishonest thing in his entire life. I’m proud to have known him and
to have worked with him all those years.’
Susan Essoyan said the same of her father’s character.
`The news world isn’t known for its gentility,’ she said. `My father
was a genuine gentleman. I remember his advice when I became a
reporter. He told me that if I ever found myself acting tough to keep
up with the competition, it was time to get out of the business.’
****
Star-Advertiser staff writer Sarah Zoellick contributed to this
report. Richard Pyle is a former foreign correspondent who spent
seven years in Tokyo as AP’s Asia news editor.
From: A. Papazian