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108 12 TIGER HUNTING WITH QUEEN ELIZABETH one of the high points of king george v’s visit to his british Indian empire in 1911 was a side trip to hunt wild game. Accompanied by a large entourage, the king visited the separate, but British-influenced, nation of Nepal. He was a guest of the Rana family of hereditary prime ministers who controlled the Himalayan country while keeping its king as a figurehead. George V spent two weeks in Nepal’s Terai, the jungled area at the northern edge of the vast Indian plains just under the first folds of the upthrusting Himalayan mountains. In elaborate tent encampments in the wilderness, the royal party dined from fine china set on white linen. The king, a crack shot from atop an elephant or in a blind, bagged twenty-one Indian tigers, eight one-horned Asian rhinoceroses, a bear, and miscellaneous other game. In those days, such game seemed plentiful, shooting them was considered the manly thing for European royalty and colonialists to do, and stuffed animals were prominent decorations of many palaces and upper-class homes. Half a century later, George V’s granddaughter went tiger hunting in Nepal. Her overnight trip to hunt in the Terai was one of the more interesting episodes in Queen Elizabeth II’s 1961 tour of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. During most of her six-week-long wanderings around South Asia, I traveled in the press group with this royal circus to report and, whenever possible, take photographs. The tour involved stultifying protocol sometimes relieved by casual conversation, boring set-piece formal occasions, some interesting sightseeing, a couple of trips to the racetrack, and a lot of dubious activities among journalists primarily from the London media. More excitingly, it gave me a chance to participate in what was probably the last great royal hunt for some of the diminishing number of tigers in the world. A journalism colleague and I were atop the “press elephant,” standing four or five elephants from the royal party in a circle of perhaps a hundred mounted Tiger Hunting with Queen Elizabeth 109 pachyderms that trapped a doomed tiger. Behind us circulated a “bar elephant” so an attendant could refresh the hunters. Later we plunged through swamps atop our elephant to follow a hunt for the Asian one-horned rhinoceros. It made for an interesting day, and a controversial one. Reporting tours of South Asia by foreign leaders was a routine requirement for the Associated Press. As the junior American correspondent in AP’s New Delhi bureau from my arrival in February 1959 until I became bureau chief in December 1961, I got lots of experience and saw a lot of the region while following around such people as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai, Indonesian president Sukarno, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, then Japan’s crown prince, later emperor, Akihito, and numerous other lesser lights. Lyndon Johnson came to India and Pakistan from visits in Southeast Asia in May 1961, just four months after he had taken office as John F. Kennedy’s vice president. At the time, the North Vietnamese effort to take over South Vietnam behind a veil of a supposedly indigenous southern insurgent force, the Viet Cong, was just a small cloud on the horizon of the new Kennedy administration . Johnson’s trip was, secretly, primarily intended to evaluate the Vietnam situation and attitudes of other Asian countries toward it. His earlier stops in Southeast Asia had been accompanied by rumors that he was covertly seeking help from U.S. allies to bolster the Saigon government so that the United States’ own involvement could be kept limited. Pakistan was an ally as a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), established in 1955 to rally countries believed to be threatened by Communist dangers. In Pakistan’s main city, Karachi, Johnson talked with President Mohammad Ayub Khan, the career soldier who had seized control of Pakistan in 1958. At a reception for Johnson that night, a few of us reporters who knew the blunt-talking Ayub gathered around him in the garden of his official residence as Johnson stood nearby. What was the point of Johnson’s visit, I asked. Was there a Vietnam angle? Ayub replied straightforwardly that Johnson had asked him to send Pakistani troops to South Vietnam to train, advise, bolster, and generally help improve...

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