Two Smiling White Men

"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.

The Men with the Revolvers. One day last week, he was traveling across Java from Bandung to Cheribon a jeep mate with brilliant Yale Sociologist Raymond Kennedy, 43. Professor Kennedy (The Ageless Indies, etc.) was an old Indies hand, had a deep affection for the people whose ways he had studied for years. Like Doyle, he believed that the way to approach them was with a smile.

At a lonely stretch of road near the village of Tomo, according to one report, a sedan overtook the jeep. Four men wearing uniforms without insignia got out of the car, forced Doyle and Kennedy at revolver's point to leave the jeep, led them into a wood a few hundred yards from the road. There, they shot the two unarmed Americans at close range from behind.

Then the men stripped the bodies and forced frightened peasants who had come to the scene to bury them. Within minutes the killers had sped away. The peasants told authorities about the murders. The Indonesian army exhumed the two bodies and transported them to Bandung for burial. Mrs. Doyle received the news in Hong Kong, where she had been waiting for her husband's return; Mrs. Kennedy received the news in New Haven, where she had been preparing for a trip to join her husband.

The Indonesian government, which deeply deplored the murders (see box), launched an immediate hunt for the killers. By week's end, they had not been found. Countless armed bands like the one that killed Doyle and Kennedy were roaming in Indonesia--and elsewhere in the chaos which is Asia in 1950. No one could blame the killings on the Indonesian government, yet if that government was to survive (as Doyle and Kennedy had hoped), it would certainly have to get the lawless men with the guns under control--quickly.

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