Roderick, John

▪ 2009

      American journalist

born Sept. 15, 1914, Waterville, Maine

died March 11, 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii

was an illustrious foreign correspondent (1937–42 and 1945–84) for the Associated Press (AP) and won admiration for his reportage of the several months he spent living (1945–47) with the Chinese rebel army and revolutionary leader Mao Zedong in caves in Yan'an, the communist stronghold. Roderick was transferred (1948) to the Middle East, and he arrived in Jordan two weeks after the creation of Israel and scooped the assassination in Jerusalem on September 17 of UN peace negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte. During the 1950s Roderick worked in London and Paris before witnessing the fall of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, during the First Indochina War (1946–54). In 1971 he accompanied the U.S. table tennis team on a trip to China, the first time since 1949 that Americans had been invited to the country. The visit opened up what came to be known as “Ping-Pong diplomacy.” The inveterate China watcher was posted (1959) to Japan until he reopened AP's Beijing office in 1979. Roderick returned to Tokyo in 1980 as an AP special correspondent. In 1985, a year after his formal retirement, the Japanese government bestowed upon him the Order of the Sacred Treasure. He continued to write until the month before his death.

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