Obituaries
Doyen of journalistic China-watchers who advised Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and saw 'right through the Bamboo Curtain'
When he sat down with Richard Nixon in Hong Kong's grand old Peninsula Hotel in 1968, Robert Elegant had told his driver he would be about half an hour. Four hours later they emerged. The future US president had gone straight to the point: "Forget Vietnam: it's a sideshow. The strategic challenge is how the US might best deal with China." Nixon, passionate anticommunist that he was, had become convinced that "the world cannot be safe until China changes" and that it must be pulled "back into the family of nations".
The question was how. Nixon sought out Elegant as the doyen of journalistic China-watchers, called by Newsweek "the man who sees right through the Bamboo Curtain" for his acute and deeply informed reporting and analysis of China under the opaque tyranny of Mao Zedong. Elegant continued to brief both Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger on China before and after Nixon's audacious foreign policy masterstroke: the decision in 1972 to end the American diplomatic boycott of the People's Republic. "You are", Nixon wrote to him years later, "my favourite China expert."
Elegant was already ahead of the pack in 1951 when he first arrived in Asia from the US, aged 23. He was armed with a Pulitzer travelling scholarship, commissions from The Reporter and the Overseas News Agency, excellent spoken and written modern and classical Chinese, highly proficient Japanese, and an idiosyncratic shorthand spattered with Chinese characters.
While he was still a graduate student, he had published China's Red Masters, a widely acclaimed who's who of the 1949 communist leadership, mostly then unknown to the West, a book valuable not least for Elegant's ability to ferret through Japanese wartime intelligence files tracking the men around Mao.
That winter he headed for war-torn Korea for the small International News Service, initially to investigate communist-instigated violence in prisoner-of-war camps (the subject of a late novel, Cry Peace). He stayed to cover the war, and broke the story of the 1953 armistice. How he got the scoop was characteristic. "A chap called Jack Casserly was shadowing the South Korean delegation to the Panmunjom peace talks and he spilled in that night, blind drunk, mumbling something we were with difficulty able to work out as 'Well, it's all over.' We, and the Associated Press and the rest, put out tentative bulletins: but to go hard on the story, we needed solid confirmation."
Elegant had become friends with Dr Pyon Yong-tae, the scholarly South Korean prime minister -"we used to meet most weeks to read Chinese poetry together" -and knew where to find him, "in a room above the bakery owned by his cousin, one of the few buildings left standing in Seoul".
Getting there at midnight, Elegant knocked and told him what they had heard. "Yes, true", said Pyon. "But we shall fight on." By this time the major news agencies were "rolling back" on the unconfirmed story.
After a couple of years based in Singapore to write The Dragon's Seed, a study of the Chinese diaspora, in 1956 Newsweek hired Elegant as Asia editor, based first in Delhi and then Hong Kong. Over the next two decades, at Newsweek and then as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he covered the Malaya emergency, Indonesian Konfrontasi and the Vietnam War.
But his primary focus was the turbulent, closed world of China. Getting at the facts was at that time singularly hard work. Foreign reporters were almost all banned and the official agency Xinhua put out what the party commanded. Painstaking decoding and interpretation of transcripts of local radio and newspapers was the least unreliable route to reporting both the leadership's shifting revolutionary agenda, and actual conditions in the country.
Then there was the question of convincing editors. In 1960 Elegant was first to pick up on the sensational Sino- Soviet split, an ideological quarrel that was to bring the two to the brink of war, but the significance was lost on Newsweek. After he finally published his scoop in The New Leader, a small leftwing American magazine, his employers ruefully introduced him to a visitor: "This is Robert Elegant. He wins prizes for other publications."
By the time, still aged only 47, he left full-time journalism in 1975 to concentrate on writing books, Elegant had earned four Overseas Press Club prizes for the best interpretation of foreign news and twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer prize. Formidably industrious, he combined journalism with a versatile output of 18 books: nonfiction works such as The Center of the World, Mao's Great Revolution and Pacific Destiny, thrillers including A Kind of Treason, which won an Edgar Allan Poe special award, and a quartet of Chinese historical novels -Dynasty, Manchu, Mandarin and From a Far Land -that became bestsellers published in 20 countries.
Proud of that success, Elegant was modest about what it meant. He recalled walking down Charing Cross Road in London with the actor Charlton Heston, discussing a possible film of Dynasty. Besieged by autograph hunters at every step, Heston turned in sympathy. "Say, Bob, you writers sure have a recognition problem."
Robert Sampson Elegant was born in the Bronx in 1928, to Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Relatives in both families were to perish in the mass slaughter accompanying Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The parents of his mother, Lillie Sampson, a librarian, had come directly to the US from Belarus. His father Louis, a lawyer, was born in London and arrived aged ten in the US -so firmly British that, when invited on the Fourth of July to recite a quotation from George Washington, his fierce response was "That Traitor! Never!"
The son inherited that combative temperament, accentuated by the antisemitism he and his younger sister Joanne encountered as children. Precocious and impatient, he could read at three, secured a place at Townsend Harris, a hothouse New York school for brilliant children, and, aged only 15, embarked at the University of Pennsylvania, having turned down a Harvard scholarship because he would have had to wait until 16.
To earn pocket money he cleaned mouse cages in the laboratory and, this being 1943, pressed army greatcoats in a laundry. There to read English, he took up Chinese because "I wanted to do a difficult language. Arabic was early morning, Chinese after lunch, so Chinese won." And set his course for life.
At 18, already a graduate, he volunteered for the US army. Not many people get much out of short tours in military and Elegant, to his subsequent relief, did not get the commission he had been led to expect. But, posted to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, he did acquire Japanese from his Japanese-American students -and an intolerance of military claptrap that earned him endless kitchen patrol duty and the exasperated roar of his commandant: "Elegant, I'm running this base, not you!" The 1944 GI Bill paid for the further stints at Yale and Columbia that launched him on his career.
Elegant could flash fire in pursuit of an argument, was incapable of dissimulation and was intellectually fearless, sometimes to his detriment. Great company he was; clubbable, he was not. In 1981, in Encounter, he published a critique of the distortions, bias and group-think displayed by American war reporters sent, often briefly and with little background knowledge, to cover the Vietnam War.
Provocative, certainly, the article was also thoughtful, detailed and, in the words of a senior US foreign policy analyst, "modest in tone and exploratory in mood". But all hell broke loose. Outraged press luminaries denounced him "from sea to shining sea", led by Morley
Safer of CBS, who accused him simultaneously of aping Hitler's mendacious propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and stooping to the methods of Soviet agitprop. To "progressive" American liberals, it marked him as the outsider he had, intellectually, always been.
In private Elegant was kind and generous, with an astounding memory, anecdotes to match, a strong sense of humour and a love of animals, notably several generations of the Tibetan race of shih tzus, lion dogs in Chinese. He took pride in being patron of the Manchu Shi Tzu Society of Great Britain.
He was fortunate in marriage, first to Moira Clarissa Brady in Delhi in 1956, with whom he had two children, Victoria, who is a physician, and Simon, also a writer. His eldest child, Roberta Pearson, a professor of film studies, was born of a pre-marital shipboard romance. Just before his death he was thrilled to learn that a granddaughter, Naomi, also a journalist, was about to have her first novel published.
In 2003, four years after Moira's death in 1999 from cancer, he married Rosemary Righter, a Times leader writer on international affairs.
For the last four decades of his long life, interspersed with visiting international fellowships and return trips to Asia, Elegant was based in London and Italy, where in 1980 the proceeds of Dynasty had paid for a much-loved old farmhouse near Todi in Umbria.
It was a haven for his writing, a pursuit driven to the end by the unquenchable curiosity that was, for him, synonymous with existence. An American reviewer of Dynasty had met Elegant back in 1961 and, somewhat patronisingly, described him thus: "A dedicated scholar-observer, Elegant knew more about the Orient than seemed necessary." A back-handed compliment, but it described him well.