On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Seymour Topping. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. 435 pp.
This book should be required reading for all journalism students and international policymakers.
More than ever in this age of social media, we need good role models for what real reporters and editors do. It would be hard to find a better one than Seymour Topping—and there is much that those who make America’s international policies can learn from a man who witnessed firsthand many of America’s worst blunders in dealing with international crises in the last half of the twentieth century, and who in this book is willing to tell the truth about them.
As a foreign correspondent for the first twenty years of his career, Topping covered some of the most momentous events of the post-World War II era, including the Communist revolution in China, the early and growing conflict in Vietnam (he was the first American correspondent in Indochina after World War II), and the Cold War in Eastern Europe.
Topping covered China and Japan from 1946 to 1947 for Hearst’s Inter-national News Service (INS), then moved to the Associated Press to report on China, Indochina, London, Geneva, and Berlin from 1947 to 1959. He reported for the New York Times from 1960 to 1985 from the Soviet Union, Geneva, Hong Kong, Indo-china, Indonesia, China, and Mongolia. He was the only reporter to cover the greatest battle of the Communist revolution at Huai-Hai, and the first journalist to report on the fall of China to Mao Zedong. He covered the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, was the first American correspondent in Vietnam, and had cocktails at a Kremlin reception with Krushchev the night the Soviets backed down in Cuba and averted thermonuclear war.
When he came home from the front lines, it was to become the Times’ foreign editor, then assistant managing editor, and managing editor during the Pentagon Papers episode, Watergate, and the fall of Richard Nixon, finishing his career fittingly as a professor of international journalism at Columbia University and administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.
Topping started his career after WWII by staying in Asia, where he had been stationed as an army infantry lieutenant. A journalism major before the war at the University of Missouri, where he had also studied Japanese and served in ROTC, he had always dreamed of being a foreign correspondent in China. When the war ended, he stayed in Asia and talked his way into a journeyman reporter’s job at the INS.
In one of his first big assignments, his reporting on the “Battle of the Huai-Hai” (chapter 6) is a textbook case in enterprise journalism, and shows why he was clearly marked for success. That conflict was “one of the largest battles in history,” he says, a turning point for the Communist victory over the Nationalists in China. He was “the lone Western reporter [covering] the Communist forces on a remote battlefield of the vast engagement and for a time their (the Communists’) prisoner.” The battle was fought between November 6, 1948, and January 10, 1949. On Christmas Eve, 1948, Topping was able to get a phone line and send one of his dispatches on the war. His AP chief, Harold Milks, added a box to the story describing Topping as “the loneliest AP staff member in the whole world this Christmas Eve.”
Topping’s story made front pages everywhere. His fiancée, a university student in Vancouver with whom he hadn’t been in contact throughout the Huai-Hai battle, was walking on a rainy Christmas Day in Vancouver and saw the newspaper and its front-page story bringing her the first news about her future husband’s whereabouts. Audrey Ronning soon became his wife, also his good fortune. She was the granddaughter of Lutheran missionaries in China, the daughter of Chester Ronning, noted Canadian diplomat in China who did much to open doors for Topping in China and later in Geneva. Audrey Topping became a noted photojournalist, publishing her pictures in Life, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine.
History as told by journalists covering it on a daily basis is never complete. In this book, Seymour Topping revisits those events, snapshot bits and pieces, pulling them back together to tell the larger story, putting them into context and making history whole. The book is much more than your standard autobiography or memoir. It is the inside history of the great events of the second half of the twentieth century—revolutions, hot wars and the Cold War, negotiations and manipulations, successes and monumental errors. And it is history not gleaned only from the archives but told by a trained observer and careful researcher who also was there to witness much of that history firsthand. Few historians can ever make that claim.
The book ends with its most important statement. In his “Epilogue,” Topping sums up of the lessons America should have learned from its mistakes in the wars in Asia, and blunders that American foreign policymakers are continuing to commit—the errors in Iraq and Afghanistan only repeating those already made in China, Korea, and Vietnam. Topping explains them briefly: a reluctance to talk to adversaries, failure to work with dependable allies, a flawed reliance on bombing, and repeating strategic misconceptions. He saves for the last few pages his major concern: the growth of secrecy in American government, which can destroy democracy faster than fascists, communists, anarchists, or terrorists. Only a free press can save us, he writes. His final paragraph is worth repeating:
“The rising generations must be persuaded that the integrity and viability of their society, particularly as they relate to national security and safeguarding of constitutional democracy, require a ‘Fourth Estate’ … able to monitor and report with competence and independence on the performance of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government. From Harry Truman to the George W. Bush administrations, the record of flawed government handling of national security issues testifies to the absolute need for a press capable of fulfilling its ‘Fourth Estate’ functions.”
Louisiana State University Press should be applauded for publishing this important book by this leading American journalist, but one has to wonder why the major national trade publishers didn’t snap it up and give it the national recognition it so richly deserves.
RAY HIEBERT
University of Maryland