Required Reading

Roy was There. And There. And There

The absorbing new autobiography by Roy Rowan '41, Powerful People (Carroll & Graf), is misnamed. It should have been titled Showing Up. Nobody has proven more uncannily good at it than the veteran Time-Life staffer.

Rowan's career began on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1947. He had just quit his job leading aid convoys between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese (and getting shot at by both sides). Stopping off at Shanghai's Palace Bar, he accepted a drink from the man next to him who happened to be Time-Life's Shanghai bureau chief. The man helped Rowan get a job with Life. Andhehasbeen showing up ever since.

He was in India immediately before the Indian army overthrew His Exalted Highness, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, richest man of his day. Rowan practically lived with Jimmy Hoffa for two weeks when the Teamster's Union mogul was at the height of his power. In charge of Life's news pages when John F. Kennedy was shot, Rowan made the decision not to publish Abraham Zapruder's picture of the President's head exploding. Rowan was in Hubert Humphrey's 15th-floor hotel suite as the presidential candidate looked down sadly on the 1968 Chicago riots.

In the course of reporting for Life, Time, and then Fortune, Rowan lunched with Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie at his palace, played touch football with Bobby Kennedy, rode with Imelda Marcos in her custom-made bus, hung out with the Hunt Brothers after their spectacular failure to corner the world's silver market, had martinis with Gerald Ford the night after Al Haig told the vice president that Nixon was resigning, and spent two weeks as a homeless person in Manhattan. "You can live withoutmoney,"astreetpersontoldhim."Butyou can't live without plans."

Wise advice for nearly everyone but Roy Rowan. He could not possibly have had a plan in his head in the Palace Bar on that fateful Pearl Harbor Day.It was enough simply to show up.