Old Asia hand Louis Kraar dies at age 71
Louis Kraar always wanted to know what was going on in Thailand, especially among the overseas Chinese who control huge business empires. To Louis, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia were close-knit groups who shared similar values and norms.
When I first met him, I didn't know Louis had been a foreign correspondent in Bangkok in the 1960s. I always wondered why he knew so much about Thailand and Southeast Asia. Kraar began his career as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 1956, and first travelled to Asia in 1961 for the paper, when he accompanied President John F Kennedy's advisers General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow on their mission to assess America's growing involvement in Vietnam. In a telling 1997 interview in the Singapore Business Times, Kraar recalled that on the plane "the staff people were frantically reading all these books about Indochina because the experts were going out there to decide what to do, and they were not very expert." He visited Hong Kong and Tokyo for the first time on the same trip, then later that year joined Time magazine as its Pentagon correspondent - with the promise that he would soon be assigned to Asia. He was the magazine's bureau chief in Bangkok from 1965-68, and also held the same post in New Delhi and Singapore. America's "secret war" in Laos, and the bloody suppression of Indonesia's communist party were among the many events Kraar covered while based in Bangkok. In 1967, Kraar was an Edward R Murrow Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York. In 1973, he joined Fortune magazine, and from 1983-88 he was based in Hong Kong as its Asia editor, interpreting the region's dramatic economic and political developments for American and regional audiences. While based in Hong Kong, his work won citations from the Overseas Press Club in 1987 and 1988. He shifted his base to New York City in 1988, but continued to travel and write about Asian issues for various publications. Kraar was among the first American journalists to write about the rising influence of Asian business on the global economy and its profound impact on the American economy. His work included three books in collaboration with Asia's most powerful business leaders, and at the time of his death he was completing a book about leading Asian family business networks with a fellowship from the Institutes for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. Kraar died last week at his home on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He was 71. He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Maureen Aung Thwin, his children, Jennifer, of Pittsburgh, and Adam, of Brooklyn. Kavi Chongkittavorn The Nation
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