DearTIME-Reader:

IN this issue appears John Graham Dowling's last story (see Frontier, 1955, HEMISPHERE). His assignment in Paraguay finished, Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Dowling was flying south to the revolt in Argentina last week when he was killed in a fog-bound airliner crash, five miles from Asuncion. He was the ninth correspondent killed on foreign assignment for TIME Inc.

Dowling, 41, was a quiet, deadpan reporter whose field was war. He started out playing at it with the toy soldiers collected for him all over the world by his famous parents, Actor-Producer Eddie Dowling and Comedienne Ray Dooley. He grew up to make a career of combat. He was in the front lines at Guadalcanal, covered the Allied campaign in New Guinea, watched the Japanese surrender in Manila Bay as a World War II correspondent for the Chicago Sun. He won the Ernie Pyle award in 1946 for distinguished war reporting. Death nearly touched him more than once: in Burma he escaped the massacre of the Chinese unit to which he was attached, and on Leyte a bomb fatally wounded three U.S. newsmen sleeping alongside him.

After the Java Sea defeat, he wrote a sardonic song called I Wanted Wings. Pilots were still singing it, eight years later, in Korea. As famous throughout the Pacific as his war song was Dowling's personal courage. Terrified of flying, he tried to overcome his fear by parachuting. On Luzon, he made a battle jump with the 11th Airborne Division in civilian street shoes. Result: one broken ankle. Said TIME HEMISPHERE Editor John Walker, who survived the Leyte bomb blast with Dowling: "Being with him made you braver than you were."

Away from a battle zone, Dowling felt AWOL, but in April 1945 he took time out to marry his Chicago editor's secretary, Patricia Louise Shafer, after an eight-day courtship. They had one child, Gordon, now two years old.

After he became TIME'S Southeast Asia correspondent in 1950, Dowling commuted between his Singapore base and the wars in Malaya and Indo-China. His painstaking dispatches for TIME'S cover stories on France's GENERAL JEAN DE LATTRE DE TASSIGNY (Sept. 24, 1951) and GENERAL SIR GERALD TEMPLER of Malaya (Dec. 15, 1952) were models of thoughtful reporting.

Reporter Dowling knew how to handle people. Stiff-backed General Templer almost managed a smile as he told him: "You are like me. I can handle you!" Cambodia's King Norodom was enchanted when Dowling did the rongeng, a Malayan dance, for him. But his basic technique, he used to say, was silence. "Sooner or later something always snaps in the other person. Someone has to talk."

Cordially yours,

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