Full of the excitement of the story as always, Scripps-Howard Correspondent Henry Noble Taylor cabled his Washington office from Rome, announced that he was heading for the rebellion-torn Congo. "It looks like a nice picnic," wrote Taylor. Four days after he landed in Leopoldville, Taylor wrote his first story about the "chaotic Congo," slugged it with the message: "This dispatch is for use Tuesday in case I am unable to file Monday from the Bakwanga hot spot." The words were prophetic: last week, covering operations near Bakwanga, Harry Taylor, 31, was killed in a bloody skirmish between Congolese troops and Baluba tribesmen. He was the first foreign correspondent to lose his life in the Congo.
Globetrotter. Taylor's short life was a full one and in the best tradition of the globe-trotting correspondent. He "was young, handsome, unmarried, talented and happy," wrote a fellow world traveler, Scripps-Howard's Robert C. Ruark. "He held his liquor like the Virginia gentleman he was. He was a fish in the water, was a lion with the girls." After graduating from Groton and the University of Virginia, Taylor served a hitch as a U.S. naval intelligence officer, after his discharge got a job with the Cincinnati Post. He did a little of everything, from interviewing a steeple jack 465 ft. off the ground to winning an American Political Science Association Award for a series on city government. In 1956 he was promoted to Scripps-Howard's Washington bureau, soon became a worldwide troubleshooter —and troublefinder—for the chain.
He covered the U.S. landings in Lebanon, interviewed Cuba's Rebel Leader Fidel Castro, floundered through hip-deep snow to see Boris Pasternak after the Rus sian writer won the Nobel Prize for Doc tor Zhivago. "In every generation," Pasternak told him, "there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it." In the past nine months alone, Taylor's copy was datelined from 23 countries. Last February, covering President Eisenhower's trip to South America, Taylor put on skindiving equipment to help search for the bodies of U.S. Navy bandsmen killed in a plane crash off Rio de Janeiro while on their way to a reception for the President. He was knocked down by the rioters who attacked Jim Hagerty in Tokyo, and he covered Francis Gary Powers' trial in Moscow. For his global reporting, Taylor won an Ernie Pyle Memorial Award.
Not at Geneva. Son of Ambassador to Switzerland Henry J. Taylor, himself a onetime Scripps-Howard correspondent and radio commentator, Taylor had entree to premiers and Cabinet ministers but also took great delight in native soldiers who played mumblety-peg with their bayonets and a Japanese girl who sang "Fish gotta slim, birds gotta fry." An unabashed idealist, he once suggested a summit conference not at "lovely Geneva" or in Paris, "where the food is pleasant," but at "radiation-scarred Hiroshima, which lost 64,000 citizens on one cruel concussion." Said President Dwight Eisenhower of the death of Harry Taylor, a first-rate newsman: "It is a tragic loss to the newspaper profession and the country."