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.