19 Facts About Stanley Karnow

Stanley Abram Karnow was an American journalist and historian.

Stanley Karnow is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War.

Stanley Karnow's father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker.

Stanley Karnow enrolled at the University of Iowa, but left in 1943 to serve in the Army Air Force, in which he was a weather observer, cryptographer and unit historian along the China-India border.

Stanley Karnow spent the most influential part of his reporting career in east and southeast Asia.

Stanley Karnow covered the region from 1959 until 1974 for Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, London Observer, the Washington Post, and NBC News.

Stanley Karnow was acquainted with Indochina from his work in Paris, and was in Vietnam in July 1959 when the first Americans were killed, He gave attention to the Vietnam War during its earliest years when few Americans were aware of it, and he reported on it for the duration of American involvement.

Stanley Karnow was close friends with Anthony Lewis and Bernard Kalb.

Stanley Karnow's Vietnam reporting landed him a place on President Nixon's "Enemies List".

Stanley Karnow was a founder and editor of the International Writers Service, a non-profit agency which commissioned work from European and Japanese journalists on their own countries and made it available to American newspapers.

Stanley Karnow worked in tandem on the series and on what became a 750-page book, Vietnam: A History.

Stanley Karnow was chief correspondent and narrator for the companion three-part PBS television documentary, The US and the Philippines: In Our Image.

Stanley Karnow immediately began work on a book on the Asian experience in the United States, but ultimately decided that an Asian was more suited for the job.

Stanley Karnow contemplated, but never executed, a fuller memoir with notional titles Out of Asia or Interesting Times.

Stanley Karnow nonetheless published reviews and articles, and remained a sought-after lecturer and media commentator until his death in 2013.

Stanley Karnow was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, and the Society of American Historians.

Stanley Karnow's papers pertaining to his work in and on Asia are archived at the Hoover Institution and the John F Kennedy Presidential Library.

Stanley Karnow was born in a Jewish family in Brooklyn on February 4,1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow.

Stanley Karnow died on January 27,2013, at his home in Potomac, Maryland, at age 87 of congestive heart failure.