"If you approach them with a smile," Bob doyle used to say of Asia's people, "they will be your friends." In the past two years, a great many people in Asia saw Doyle's quiet, friendly smile as he walked among them in their war-torn cities and starved villages to report their story. TIME-LIFE Correspondent Robert Doyle, 31, succeeded, as few other newsmen had, in telling of their misery, their confusion and their hopes.
He brought to his task good will and an eager, gentle manner that touched people, prompting them to tell him what they thought. He also brought considerable training. Chicago-born Bob Doyle, graduate of Northwestern University, had been a newsman and radio writer before he entered the U.S. Navy to serve in the Pacific as senior intelligence officer to Airman Admiral Arthur Radford. After the war, he studied Far Eastern history at Columbia and Chinese at Yale's Institute of Far Eastern Languages (whose director called him one of the most brilliant students who ever attended the institute). In 1947, he came to work for TIME Inc., soon took charge of TIME-LIFE'S Shanghai Bureau, the sort of job for which he had been carefully preparing himself since he laid aside his uniform. He told the great and bitter story of Nationalist China's demoralization and retreat, of the Communist sweep to victory.
"Nothing Could Be Worse." On the battlefield of Suchow (TIME, Nov. 29, 1948), Reporter Doyle watched the Nationalist soldiers' dispirited attempt to beat back the Communists, and in besieged North China he talked to a group of miners whose conversation reflected the spirit of Nationalist China after a decade of war. Doyle, who could speak their own language, asked them if they would flee if the Communists came. "Flee?" asked one miner bitterly. "Flee where? To America?" Said another: "Nothing could be much worse than our life now . . ."
Doyle reported Shanghai's fall to Communism, staying on longer than most other U.S. newsmen. Writing about China's new boss, Mao Tse-tung (LIFE, Jan. 23) he drew the moral of the story: "In the cities and the areas of China which they held, Chiang's forces became identified with defeat, despair and disorder. The will to resist waned and, by this curious conspiracy of circumstances, revolutionary Communism came to be associated with—of all things—order and the promise of peace. This was the process, sped by the age-old agonies of Asia's crowded, impoverished lands, that brought a determined, rebellious Hunanese peasant and an alien ideology of the West to the overlordship of China's millions."
Last fall, Doyle went to Indonesia to cover the Dutch exodus and the rise of a new nation in the troubled islands (TIME, Nov. 14 et seq.). He liked the young, eager, inexperienced Republican leaders, thought they had a fair chance of establishing orderly government amid the ruins of colonial rule and the wreckage of war. After several months in Hong Kong and Siam, he went back to Indonesia to see how the new republic was getting on.