Obituaries : Robert Shaplen; Writer and Noted Asia Scholar

Robert Shaplen, an analytical and reflective writer for New Yorker magazine who became one of the world’s leading Asia scholars in a career that spanned five decades, has died. He was 71.

Shaplen died here Sunday only weeks after returning from a trip to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Korea. The Princeton, N.J., resident became ill on the trip and entered the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center three weeks ago for treatment of thyroid cancer.

Shaplen, author of 10 books mostly about Asia, reported for the old New York Herald Tribune and was an Asia correspondent for Newsweek, Fortune and Collier’s magazines before joining New Yorker, where he worked for 36 years, beginning in 1952.

Highlights of his career included going ashore with the Marines on Leyte in the Philippines in 1944, flying over Nagasaki hours after it was devastated by the atomic bomb in August, 1945, marching with Mao Zedong in China and writing strategic and battlefield pieces from Korea and Vietnam in the 1960s.

An orientation visit with Shaplen was considered a must for correspondents new to Asia, even though younger writers often found that his pro-U.S., moderate Vietnam viewpoint differed widely from their own.

His last book, “Bitter Victory,” published in 1986, stemmed from his 1984 trip to Vietnam and Cambodia.