Mao's Columbus

For decades. Western journalists writing about China found themselves using phrases like "As Chou En-lai once told Edgar Snow . . ." or "As Mao Tse-tung recently explained to Snow . . ." Journalist-Author Snow not only had unique access to Peking and a lifetime of expertise but also a personal friendship with Mao dating back to the 1930s. Last year Mao's American friend could relate reliably in LIFE that the Chairman would welcome a visit by Richard Nixon "either as a tourist or as President."

Snow was planning to cover the

Nixon trip this week for LIFE. But he began having backaches last year; what he dismissed as lumbago turned out to be cancer. Chou showed his concern by dispatching two doctors and a nurse from Peking, but they could not help. Last week, with his wife, son and daughter at his bedside, Snow, 66, died in his farmhouse at Eysins, Switzerland --on the Chinese New Year's Day, and just six days before President Nixon's arrival in Peking. Said Mao in a personal message to Snow's widow: ''His memory will live forever in the hearts of the Chinese people."

Cooped-Up Rebels. Though one of his forebears had been appointed the first resident consul in Canton by President James Madison, it was mostly wanderlust that led the Missouri-born Snow into a lifelong love affair with China. After earning a journalism degree at the University of Missouri and working as a reporter briefly in Kansas

City and New York, he set out on a round-the-world trip in 1928. He intended to visit China for only six weeks, but the country captivated him, and he was outraged by the suffering he saw. In the course of covering China for the New York Sun and other publications, he gradually grew disillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Snow decided that the mysterious rebels cooped up in the northwest by Chiang's troops were the wave of China's future.

He finally broke through the Nationalist blockade of the Communists in northern Shensi province in 1936 and spent four months with Mao, Chou and other leaders. The resulting book, Red Star Over China, was a masterpiece of reporting, and it cast Snow from then on as both a biographer and a sometime spokesman for Mao. Author Theodore White, who covered China during World War II. calls Red Star "an example of classic reportage. Ed's discovery and description of Chinese Communism was a staggering achievement, like Columbus discovering America." Said Snow of Mao: "Here is a man in whom you feel a certain force of destiny, a kind of solid, elemental vitality."

Ironic Gossip. Snow correctly saw the Communists as much more than a bunch of bandits. But his enthusiastic characterization of the leaders as Reel Robin Hoods seemed somewhat overdrawn. Later, during Joseph McCarthy's heyday, Snow was castigated as a Red propagandist. Ironically, he was also the target of gossip linking him to the Central Intelligence Agency. Whatever the charges, Snow never forgot that he was an American. He made no move to renounce citizenship, as did some admirers of Mao, and his 20-year-old daughter Sian (the name means "Western Peace" in Mandarin) is a student at Antioch College.

Snow's reporting remained indispensable to serious students of China. His 1962 book. The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, is widely regarded as the best single piece of writing on China under the Communists. More recent articles concentrated on the current Chinese lifestyle. They included crisp, if hardly conclusive comparisons with conditions in the West: "The man in the street is well fed, in good health, adequately clothed . . . His worries do not include increases in food prices, the cost of Medicare or taxes. He lives within a slender budget, but in compensation he doesn't know debts, mortgages, the fear of hunger which afflicted his parents."

On his last trip to Peking, in 1970, Snow was invited to stand beside Mao on the rostrum at the National Day celebrations. The visitor accurately interpreted this honor as a sign that Mao wanted better relations with the U.S., and Mao confirmed that in his interview with Snow, in which he virtually invited Nixon to come to Peking.

Snow's criticism of Peking's authoritarian excesses sometimes seemed too low-key. The reason was, perhaps, that Snow saw himself as a contributor to better relations between Peking and Washington. To the end, he was interested in preserving his precious contacts against the day of just such an event as the Nixon trip. That visit, Snow said, could open "a new era of Far Eastern and world politics."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.