Born in New York on 1 February 1920 , Roy Rowan graduated in 1941 from Dartmouth College and a year later earned his MBA from Dartmouth 's Amos Tuck School . Drafted as a private into the U.S. Army in May 1942 , Rowan served in Tunisia , New Guinea and the Philippines , winning a Bronze Star and finishing the war as a major . In 1946 he took a job running a fleet of trucks in central China for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration ( UNRRA ) . With the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists erupting around him , he delivered food , clothing , and farm equipment to villages recovering from the Japanese Occupation , and contributed freelance articles and photographs to U.S. publications . Hired by Time-Life magazine in 1947 and paired with photographer Jack Birns , Rowan , already something of a China Hand , covered all the major battles of the Chinese Communist Revolution by hitching rides with General Claire Chennault ’s former Flying Tigers , hired to airlift military supplies for Chiang Kai-shek ’s Nationalist troops . Rowan and Birns were the only foreign journalists in Manchuria when the Communists conquered the province in 1948 . Struck down by a bout of typhoid and jaundice , Rowan recovered to see Chairman Mao 's troops enter Shanghai in May 1949 before being sent to cover the Malayan insurgency and the Korean War . In 1951 Rowan began reporting on the Cold War in Europe . A story he tracked down in Yugoslavia about a mother ’s fight to win back her son kidnapped as a baby by a German SS soldier during World War II was made into a movie called " Divided Heart ” by the British film mogul , J. Arthur Rank . In 1952 , after proposing by trans-Atlantic telephone , Rowan married Helen Rounds , a Life picture researcher from Birmingham , Michigan . The couple went on to have four sons . As Life 's Chicago bureau chief from 1955 , Rowan covered the Little Rock school crisis and in 1957 he was the first writer to reach the " House of Horrors " in Plainfield , Wisconsin , which inspired Alfred Hitchcock 's movie , ' Psycho ' . In 1959 , while still based in Chicago as Life 's assistant managing editor in charge of news , Rowan spent a month with Jimmy Hoffa to profile the Teamster boss for Life and in 1963 he led the magazine 's coverage of the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy . Rowan 's team managed to obtain the Zapruder film , which showed President Kennedy 's death , and published frames from the film on Life 's front page . Leaving Life in 1970 after 23 years working with the publication , Rowan founded his own publication , '' On the Sound '' , a magazine , covering the coast between New York City and Boston . The first in an intended series of regional waterfront publications , two years later it was followed by '' On the Shore '' , a magazine for the Chesapeake Bay area . In 1972 Universal Publishing Corporation acquired the two magazines and Time rehired Rowan to return as Hong Kong bureau chief . In 1973 during the Vietnam War , Rowan was one of the few journalists the North Vietnamese government invited to inspect the infamous " Hanoi Hilton " prison that housed American Prisoners of War . On April 30 , 1975 Rowan was one of the final foreign journalists evacuated from Saigon by helicopter
assassination of President J.F. Kennedy .
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Roy Rowan