Rich spent nearly 30 years as a war correspondent for NBC News. A graduate of
Bowdoin College, he became a U.S. Marine in 1942 and made four D-Day landings in the Pacific Theater. After the war, while working in Tokyo for
William Randolph Hearst's
International News Service, he interviewed General
Douglas MacArthur and traveled with
Emperor Hirohito. Additionally, he covered Shanghai's fall to the communists. Rich began working for NBC in late 1950 and arrived in Korea less than a week after the war began. He worked there for over three years – longer than any other American correspondent. Having been used mostly for radio, he appeared on
The Today Show to cover the ceasefire talks and eventually became a television correspondent. After having covered the Korean War, he took a wide variety of assignments, heading the NBC bureau in Berlin for four years and reporting on the Vietnam War for ten years. He reported on nearly every major armed conflict that occurred during his time at NBC. By the end of his career, he became NBC's senior Asian correspondent and was appointed vice-president of
RCA Corporation. After having been retired for many years, Rich was featured in
NBC Nightly News' Making a Difference segment on July 24, 2008. ==Korean War coverage and photos==