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Roy Essoyan
NEW YORK (AP) – 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.
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.
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.
>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 Ha waii where he died Thursday of natural causes at
age 92 at his home in Pupukea on the North Shore of Oahu, said daughter
Susan Essoyan.
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, which offered its own business opportunities. They were there when
the Japanese took over half of the city in 1937.
Roy 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
what not.”
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.
Susan Essoyan said “the ship’s captain found his given name, Karekin, too
difficult and asked, ‘What do I yell when I need you?’ They settled on Roy,
which later became his byline.”
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. … Over night they had
effectively completed the whole takeover by commandeering utilities and
power companies, the telephone company, the radio stations.”
Life became hard during the occupation. Roy’s older brother was killed by a
hit-and-run Japanese army truck, and the Essoyans found that being stateless
did not protect them from the harsh treatment endured by citizens of western
countries living in Shanghai’s famous International Settlement.
“It was better to have a government standing up for you,” Essoyan said in
the 2002 interview.
As the conflict ended in 1945, Roy, 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. There, 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 survi ved 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. Years later, he recalled how foreign
correspondents were forced to live in state-assigned apartments where
elevators took passengers up but not down, and government eavesdropping was
so pervasive that “even the lampshades were bugged.”
Denied contact with ordinary Russians, reporters scoured propaganda-laden
newspapers and official pronouncements for nuggets of news and never missed
diplomatic receptions where Soviet officials might turn up. But everything
was subject to strict and sometimes arbitrary censorship.
In 1958, Essoyan slipped past the censors a “news analysis” saying
Khrushchev and Mao Zedong were secretly but sharply at odds over Mao’s
refusal to agree to an internati onal summit meeting unless his Communist
regime replaced Nationalist China as Beijing’s representative.
Essoyan had been warned twice by Soviet censors, but his expulsion from
Moscow – a distinction regarded by many Western journalists as a badge of
honor – was likely assured when the influential Washington-based columnist
Joseph Alsop singled him out for praise.
“If the Russian censors have permitted Essoyan to say that Nikita Khrushchev
has suffered a public setback, then Nikita is out,” Alsop told his readers.
That wasn’t what happened, Essoyan noted later. The censors had not approved
his story, and Khrushchev was not out. Essoyan was.
Being banished from Moscow, however, did not end his interaction with Soviet
officials. 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. Essoyan described one
such mission as “gamesmanship, beautifully orchestrated and achieving
absolutely nothing because the Viet Cong knew what was happening, the
(South) Vietnamese didn’t want bloodshed. I wrote a lovely, long story,
which ended by saying, ‘As we flew away, the flag of South Vietnam was
flying, but tomorrow morning the communists would be back.’ And this is what
happened … most of the time.”
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.
Harry Koundakjian, a fellow Armenian in Beirut who later photographed
Lebanon’s civil war for the AP, recalled that New York chiefs had ordered
Essoyan to “fire Harry” after his photos from earthquake-ravaged Iran showed
up only in Life magazine.
“Roy answered back, saying I was only a stringer, and AP’s New York and
London photo desks had earlier rejected my photos. Then came another
message: ‘Hire Harry.'”
James Abrams, an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who joined the AP in Tokyo in
1979, recalled Essoyan as “everyone’s mentor” in a bureau stocked with
legendary AP veterans and ambitious newcomers.
“Everyone, from the uptight Japanese newspaper e xecutives who loved his
company, to the young Japanese and American reporters who learned from him,
were infected by his hearty laugh and buoyant take on life,” said Abrams, a
longtime member of the AP’s staff in Washington.
In interviews after retiring, Essoyan offered a nostalgic view of the
fast-paced, demanding craft of wire service reporting.
“It was a great life, 40 years of expenses-paid vacation,” he told one
interviewer. “Think of all the places that people want to go to, whether
it’s the Pyramids or the Sphinx or the Great Wall or the Taj Mahal, I’ve
been there.
“We used to say, ‘How else do you get to talk to kings and emperors and
presidents and prime ministers?’
“The AP was more than a family to me,” Essoyan said. “It was like a
nationality.”
RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press
Richard Pyle is a former foreign correspondent who spent seven years in
Tokyo as AP’s Asia News Editor.
Copyright C 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.