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Obituary
Roy Essoyan, 92; AP reporter revealed Sino-Soviet split
By Richard Pyle | Associated Press March 24, 2012
Roy Essoyan was expelled from Moscow for what Russia's foreign
ministry called `a rude violation of Soviet censorship.'' Above, the
reporter working in Beirut in 1971.
NEW YORK - 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 Mr. 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,
Mr. 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 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.''
After 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, Mr. 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 reached Asia in late
1941, trapping many foreigners in China.
Mr. 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. . . .
Overnight 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,'' Mr. 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 US 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 leaves Biggs; daughters Susan and Catherine; sons
David and Stephen; and nine grandchildren.
After a steady news diet of Hawaiian volcanoes and VIP visits to the
islands, the Russian-speaking Mr. Essoyan was tapped in 1955, at 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, Mr. Essoyan slipped past the censors a `news analysis''
saying Khrushchev and Mao 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.
Mr. 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 - probably was assured when the influential
Washington-based columnist Joseph Alsop singled him out for praise.
`If the Russian censors have permitted Mr. Essoyan to say that Nikita
Khrushchev has suffered a public setback, then Nikita is out,'' Alsop
told his readers.
That wasn't what happened, Mr. Essoyan noted later. The censors had
not approved his story, and Khrushchev was not out. Mr. 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, Mr. 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
Mr. Essoyan's baseball cap: `Why do you wear those silly beanies?''
Mr. 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, Mr. Essoyan helped the AP
cover the early days of the Vietnam War, accompanying South Vietnamese
troops and their US advisers on helicopter-borne operations. Mr.
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,' '' he said. `And this is what happened . .
. most of the time.''
After a brief stint in Cairo, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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, a former Peace Corps volunteer who joined the AP in
Tokyo in 1979, recalled Mr. Essoyan as `everyone's mentor'' in a
bureau stocked with legendary AP veterans and ambitious newcomers.
`Everyone, from the uptight Japanese newspaper executives 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, Mr. 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,'' Mr. Essoyan said. `It was like
a nationality.''
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Roy Essoyan, 92; AP reporter revealed Sino-Soviet split
By Richard Pyle | Associated Press March 24, 2012
Roy Essoyan was expelled from Moscow for what Russia's foreign
ministry called `a rude violation of Soviet censorship.'' Above, the
reporter working in Beirut in 1971.
NEW YORK - 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 Mr. 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,
Mr. 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 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.''
After 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, Mr. 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 reached Asia in late
1941, trapping many foreigners in China.
Mr. 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. . . .
Overnight 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,'' Mr. 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 US 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 leaves Biggs; daughters Susan and Catherine; sons
David and Stephen; and nine grandchildren.
After a steady news diet of Hawaiian volcanoes and VIP visits to the
islands, the Russian-speaking Mr. Essoyan was tapped in 1955, at 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, Mr. Essoyan slipped past the censors a `news analysis''
saying Khrushchev and Mao 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.
Mr. 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 - probably was assured when the influential
Washington-based columnist Joseph Alsop singled him out for praise.
`If the Russian censors have permitted Mr. Essoyan to say that Nikita
Khrushchev has suffered a public setback, then Nikita is out,'' Alsop
told his readers.
That wasn't what happened, Mr. Essoyan noted later. The censors had
not approved his story, and Khrushchev was not out. Mr. 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, Mr. 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
Mr. Essoyan's baseball cap: `Why do you wear those silly beanies?''
Mr. 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, Mr. Essoyan helped the AP
cover the early days of the Vietnam War, accompanying South Vietnamese
troops and their US advisers on helicopter-borne operations. Mr.
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,' '' he said. `And this is what happened . .
. most of the time.''
After a brief stint in Cairo, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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, a former Peace Corps volunteer who joined the AP in
Tokyo in 1979, recalled Mr. Essoyan as `everyone's mentor'' in a
bureau stocked with legendary AP veterans and ambitious newcomers.
`Everyone, from the uptight Japanese newspaper executives 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, Mr. 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,'' Mr. Essoyan said. `It was like
a nationality.''
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress