Veteran NBC Correspondent John H. Rich Jr. Dies

John Hubbard Rich Jr., veteran NBC News war correspondent, died on April 9 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. , five weeks after the death of his wife, Doris Lee, of 60 years.  He was 96.

Born Aug. 5, 1917, he grew up in Portland, Maine, and graduated in 1939 from Bowdoin College where he was editor-in-chief of the school paper.

He started his career as a reporter with the Kennebec Journal in Augusta after college and joined the Portland Press Herald about a year later. He got his start as a war correspondent even before the war began when, as a reporter for the Press Herald, he interviewed the survivors of the destroyer USS Reuben James, the first U.S. warship sunk in World War II, five weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

With the outbreak of the war, he parlayed his college French major into a commission with the U.S. Marine Corps, exchanging French for Japanese, which he learned at the Navy Language School.

Immediately upon the end of the war in the Pacific, he returned to Japan as a correspondent for the International News Service. He covered the International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo, interviewed “Tokyo Rose,” and was once called upon to serve as impromptu interpreter for wartime Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo and his American lawyer.

From Japan, he covered the Chinese civil war, narrowly escaping Shanghai down the Whangpoo River on a U.S. gunboat as it fell to the communists in 1949. Within a week of the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, he sailed from Japan to Pusan with the 24th Division Artillery and covered the Korean War for the next three years, broadcasting the signing of the armistice at Pan Mun Jom in 1953 for NBC, which he joined six months into the war.

In Seoul, on a tennis court, he met his self-described “Seoul mate,” Doris Lee, then a secretary with the State Department.  While starting a family, he covered the French war in Indochina, the 1955 Argentine revolution, making the first radio broadcast from revolutionary headquarters in Mendoza, the violent uprising of the forces of Patrice Lumumba in the Belgium Congo, and the raising of the Iron Curtain in Berlin, where his family of four children, two born in Germany, lived 200 yards from the barbed wire.

A reassignment to Paris proved hardship duty after the outbreak of the Algerian Revolution and the subsequent inhospitality of his miffed French host who temporarily refused to renew his press credentials after a speech at the National Press Club in Washington in January 1961 where he dared to say that France faced the “very real possibility” of civil war over the Algerian crisis.

From France, the family moved to Tokyo where, as NBC’s Senior Correspondent in Asia, for more than a decade he covered the war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and saw all four children graduate from high school.  In 1971, he and friend and fellow Mainer John Roderick of the Associated Press were the only two American journalist allowed in China with the “Ping Pong Delegation.”  A year later, he accompanied Nixon’s trip to China.  Following that historic visit, in 1974, he won the Peabody Award, the Overseas Press Club Award for “Best reporting from Asia in any medium,” and an honorary degree from Bowdoin College at the age of 56.

Rich is survived by his daughter, Barbarine Rich, and her husband, Toshio Okumura, of Boston, Massachusetts; by his son, John H. Rich III, and his wife Joanne Rich, of Falmouth, Maine; by his son, Whitney Rich, and his wife Kumiko Umemoto of Tokyo, Japan; by his son, Nathaniel Rich, and his wife Ming Hsu of Hong Kong, China; by his brother-in-law, Ralph Halstead, and his wife Alice Halstead of Hemet, California; and by grandchildren Dylan, Madelaine, Malcolm, Johnny, and Helene.

Please visit www.lindquistfuneralhome.com to view a video collage of John’s life and to share condolences, memories and tributes with his family.

In lieu of flowers, a contribution may be made to the John Hubbard Rich Jr. Family Scholarship Fund at Bowdoin College.