When Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961, in shaping his Vietnam policy, he had his experience in Saigon in 1951 very much in mind. He had remained persuaded that weaning popular support away from Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist banner was the key to victory. The only instrument available to Kennedy for winning “the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people was the Saigon government. Success in Vietnam would turn on making that government stronger, more effective, and attractive to the Vietnamese people. This was his intention when, upon return from his confrontation with Khrushchev in Vienna, he tripled the number of American military advisers working with the South Vietnamese army.
From the Eisenhower administration Kennedy had inherited a client Vietnamese government headed by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem had ousted the French puppet, Bao Dai, and his administration was nominally independent. To shore up the government, Kennedy framed a counter-insurgency plan that provided Diem with financial support for an increase of 20,000 in the size of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which then stood at 150,000, and additional aid for the local Civil Guard, the counterguerrilla auxiliary. Later in the year, he augmented the program to bring the ARVN up to a strength of 200,000. Kennedy also deployed American Special Forces units, known as Green Berets, for covert action against North Vietnam. In return for this broad support, Kennedy asked Diem to undertake reforms that would rejuvenate the South Vietnamese military forces as well as a political action designed to inspire popular support. But not many months later he was told by his military and political advisers that Diem was failing despite this large-scale American support to transform his government into an effective countervailing force against Ho Chi Minh. In frustration, Kennedy approved in 1963 a CIA-inspired coup by dissident Vietnamese generals to topple Diem. The president had been persuaded that a competent replacement had to be found immediately for Diem, who among other things had become increasingly unpopular because of his repression of the Buddhists. The coup by the generals was staged on November 1, but as it went forward, unexpectedly and apparently without direct CIA complicity, Diem was assassinated.
Three weeks after Diem’s assassination I was in New York, back from three years in Moscow and about to leave for Hong Kong to become the chief correspondent for Southeast Asia with oversight responsibility for our Saigon bureau. In preparation for the assignment I planned to go to Washington for background talks with officials. I thought of asking for an appointment with the president but then decided not to when I learned that four weeks earlier Kennedy had complained to the publisher of the Times about the reporting of David Halberstam, one of our correspondents in Saigon. At a meeting in Washington Kennedy had told Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger that Halberstam had become “too close to the story” and lost his objectivity. He urged Sulzberger to arrange his transfer. Sulzberger rejected the suggestion without hesitation. It was an odd and senseless suggestion, especially in the context of Kennedy’s prior experience with the Times. In April 1960, the paper had been pressured by the Central Intelligence Agency to withhold a story by Tad Szulc reporting that an invasion of Cuba was imminent. The Times carried the Szulc story but omitted, at the insistence of the publisher, Orville Dryfoos, details which if published, he had been told, might imperil the operation. The Bay of Pigs invasion, which took place on April 17, was a disastrous failure resulting in 114 of the exiles killed and more than 1,100 taken captive. Kennedy berated the Times for disclosing the invasion prematurely with its publication of the Szulc story. But at a meeting in the White House of newspaper executives he told Turner Catledge, the managing editor, in a private aside: “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.” Kennedy might very well have applied the same logic to Halberstam’s perceptive critique of the conduct of the Vietnam War.
Several weeks after I took up my post in Hong Kong, I met Halberstam as he was returning home on leave following fifteen months in Vietnam. His scheduled leave had been delayed by Times executives so that it would not be interpreted as a transfer in compliance with Kennedy’s intervention. On December 11, in a letter to Manny Freedman, the foreign news editor, dealing generally with plans for coverage of Southeast Asia, I said: “I have had an opportunity to talk to David Halberstam over the last two days. He seems to be in good shape. Halberstam expressed the wish to return to the Southeast Asia Bureau. I told him he would be welcomed after a period in New York during which he would be exposed to the practical problems of putting out the paper. If the staffing arrangements work out appropriately, I would like to see Halberstam back here. We would work well together.”
The reference to Halberstam’s need to become more informed about the problems of putting out the paper alluded to his ongoing battles with the Foreign Desk. Halberstam’s great strength as a newspaper reporter was his ability to dig out facts, analyze them intelligently, and present them courageously. However, the quality of his copy in style and form was not always up to Times standards. Given his rather combative nature, he did not take well to editing or queries. Uncomfortable about the controversy surrounding him, the senior Times executives in New York did not offer Halberstam another Southeast Asia assignment, although he was nominated by the paper and shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press. The pair was cited for “their individual reporting of the Vietnam War and the overthrow of the Diem regime.” In approving the coup against Diem, Kennedy in effect accepted the view manifest in Halberstam’s reporting, that it was self-defeating for the United States to continue to back the inept, corrupt dictator.
Halberstam’s next assignment was to Poland, where his reporting on such sensitive subjects as the prevalence of anti-Semitism led to his expulsion by the Communist government on a charge of “slander.” At a subsequent posting to Paris, where he was preoccupied personally with writing a novel, his performance was undistinguished. He resigned from the Times in 1967 to join Harper’s. It was in magazine and book writing, beginning with his brilliant The Best and the Brightest, a massive volume on Washington’s conduct of the Vietnam War, that he found contentment and fulfillment, until his tragic death in 2007 in a car crash.
On November 22, just before leaving New York for my new posting in Hong Kong, I was invited to the publisher’s lunch on the fourteenth floor of the Times building. The police commissioner of New York was the guest of honor, and he was telling us how difficult it was to guard the president on his visits to the city when Clifton Daniel, the assistant managing editor, was called to the phone. Daniel returned, features taut, and said: “President Kennedy has been shot; he may be dying.” Turning to leave, he said in a level voice, “Anybody who has work to do better go downstairs.” I followed Punch Sulzberger, the publisher, to the elevators and down to the third-floor news-room, which was in an uproar. Tom Wicker, who had been covering the president, was telephoning from Dallas.
Inexplicably, there was no advance obit for the young president. Arthur Gelb, the deputy metropolitan editor, collared me. “Will you do the foreign policy section of the obit?” he asked pleadingly. I hesitated. Sequestered in Moscow for three years, I had not been able to keep abreast of all aspects of Kennedy’s management of foreign affairs. But I agreed and took my place on the front rewrite desk beside Homer Bigart, the distinguished and tough veteran of the Korean War, who was writing the obit’s domestic policy review. Copy boys were bringing stacks of clippings. At 2:30 P.M. Daniel, his horn-rimmed glasses perched atop his silver hair, came to the rewrite desk and, pausing before Bigart and me, said: “He’s dead.” Between then and 6:30 P.M. Bigart and I wrote what made up a page of the Times. Afterward we walked together to Bleeck’s saloon on Fortieth Street. We drank and talked about Kennedy until Homer went into the telephone booth to call his wife, Jane. I elbowed up to the crowded bar to order another scotch and when I returned, I glanced through the window of the telephone booth and saw that Bigart, the indomitable war correspondent, was weeping. He was not alone. I left the bar and walked across Times Square. The lights were dimmed. In my room at the Astor Hotel, I lay awake thinking of the young congressman in Saigon and haunted by the question of how he would have finally dealt with the Vietnam imbroglio if he had lived. In the morning, before leaving for Washington, I scribbled notes about what I thought Kennedy would have done.
When Kennedy consented to the CIA coup to remove Diem, he was hoping for a replacement who would have the nationalist characteristics needed to attract popular support away from Ho Chi Minh. That imperative was born of the mind-set he developed in Saigon. The shock of Diem’s assassination, only three weeks before his own assassination, ended the president’s experiment. The fatal error lay, not in what Kennedy aspired to from his days in Saigon, but in the fact that when he became president it was too late in the ideological struggle. After more than two decades of political disappointments and revolutionary struggle, no Saigon government tainted by association with foreigners, French or American, could diminish Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist appeal. At the time of Kennedy’s death, Ho Chi Minh was gaining power, reinforced by an unending supply of recruits rallying to his nationalist banner and armed with full array of weapons coming over the porous China border. Paradoxically, if anything, Kennedy’s policy of pressing devastating counterinsurgency sweeps, sometimes employing his Green Berets, had tended to turn more of the peasantry to support of Ho Chi Minh and his southern Vietcong allies.
Up until JFK’s death, Edmund Gullion continued to be a close adviser to the president, persuading him to continue his support of the Vietnamese government. After the assassination, Gullion left the Foreign Service to become dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, but he remained in close touch with the Kennedy family. In the summer of 1965, the State Department called him out of retirement to serve as intermediary in a top-secret mission, code-named “XYZ.” It was undertaken after Mai Van Bo, the chief of the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris, had made an informal overture hinting that there might be a softening of the forbidding preconditions, known as the Four Points, laid down by Premier Pham Van Dong for the opening of peace negotiations. Gullion met three times with Bo in Paris, but the channel abruptly closed when Bo failed to show up for a fourth meeting as the United States intensified its bombing of North Vietnam.
In February 1967, I visited Medford, Massachusetts, at Gullion’s request to lecture at Fletcher. I found Gullion very distressed because Robert Kennedy was moving away from him on Vietnam policy and was adopting a militant antiwar position. Gullion himself was being harassed on his own campus by student antiwar activists. But he was persisting as a strong advocate of American support for the Saigon government’s war effort. On March 2, Bobby, who had adhered to a stand similar to that of his brother following their Saigon visit, broke with the policies of the Johnson administrations and called for American withdrawal from Vietnam. Appealing for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and the opening of negotiations with Hanoi, Robert Kennedy declared: “Under the direction of the United Nations and with an international presence gradually replacing American forces, we should move forward to a final settlement which allows all major political elements in South Vietnam to participate in the choice of leadership and shape their future as a people.”
Later that year, speaking about Vietnam policy in an interview with John Stewart for an oral history, Robert Kennedy recalled the 1951 trip he made with his brother to Asia. The trip, he said, made a great impression on John, “a very very major impression . . . these countries from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea all . . . searching for a future; what their relationship was going to be to the United States; what we were going to do in our relationship to them; the importance of the right kind of representation; the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, the mistake of the war in Indochina; the mistake of the French policy; the failure of the United States to back the people.”
The debate has never ceased about what course Kennedy would have followed if he had lived and served a second term. As for me, I believe that Jack Kennedy would have followed a course, possibly after the 1964 elections, similar to that proposed by his brother, with whom he had been very much in accord on Vietnam policy. He would have done so once he had concluded that it was simply too late to expect that any client government in Saigon could succeed in drawing a substantial number of the Vietnamese people away from support of Ho Chi Minh.
I had a second meeting in Asia with Robert Kennedy after our encounter in Saigon in 1951. Less than a month after his brother’s death, Bobby, then attorney general, was sent to Southeast Asia by President Johnson to mediate in a violent dispute between Sukarno, the Indonesian president, and the leaders of the newly formed British-sponsored Federation of Malaysia. President Sukarno had denounced creation of the federation as “neo-colonialism” and was supporting anti-British guerrilla rebels in Malaya. The Kennedy mission was an important one of some urgency but also motivated in part by a desire to divert and reinvigorate the grieving Bobby. From my post in Hong Kong, I joined the traveling Kennedy party, which also included his wife, Ethel, in Tokyo. Kennedy was to meet there with Sukarno. I covered the talks during which Kennedy secured from Sukarno a tentative agreement to a cease-fire accord with Malaysian leaders.
Kennedy also spoke to an audience of thousands at Waseda University stadium, where he told the cheering Japanese students and faculty: “If President Kennedy’s life and death and his relationship to all in our age group mean anything, it means we young people must work harder for a better life for all the people in the world.”
Kennedy left for Korea on the evening of January 18, and I was with him aboard his U.S. Air Force transport. He planned to spend a day with American troops in Korea before continuing on to Malaysia and then to Jakarta for another meeting with Sukarno to cement the cease-fire accord. Airborne, the plane developed engine trouble and returned to Tokyo. A cable from the Times’ Foreign Desk awaited me there. Proceed to Taiwan. France had broken ranks with the United States and recognized the Communist government in Peking. I was to cover the reaction of the Chiang Kai-shek government. I said good-bye to Kennedy at the Tokyo airport before his plane took off again for Korea.
In Tokyo, I had talked to Bobby about Saigon in 1951. With a sad half smile, he spoke of how important those days in Saigon had been for him and his brother. He said little about President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy except to repeat rather wearily what his brother had said so often: There was no chance of winning the war unless the South Vietnamese government gained the support of the people.
Correspondents in 1957 at Checkpoint Charlie entry from the American sector of West Berlin to Communist East Berlin. From left: the author, who was then stationed in Berlin for the Associated Press, Joe Fleming (United Press), Ed de Fontaine (Army Radio), Terry Davidson (Reuters), Harry Gilroy (New York Times), unidentified officer, Gary Stindt (CBS), Russell Hill (Radio Free Berlin), Jeremy Main (International News Service). Courtesy author
In 1958 an American army helicopter with nine servicemen aboard strayed over Communist East Germany and was forced down. The author was allowed in response to his repeated requests to meet with the captive servicemen who were held in a villa in the East German city of Dresden. Topping is shown speaking to Major George Kemper while his comrades look on. The worldwide publicity given Topping’s story was instrumental in obtaining their release. Courtesy Associated Press
U.S. Ambassador Lewellyn Thompson with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Jane Thompson, and Nina Khrushchev at a Benny Goodman concert in 1960 in the Moscow Sports Palace. Khrushchev, who hated jazz, left the hall during the intermission. Thompson subsequently was recalled to Washington and was at President Kennedy’s side during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Photos by Audrey Topping
The author and Audrey Topping attended a Kremlin reception on November 7, 1962. It was the day Soviet Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy resolved the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev told Topping that a thermonuclear war had been averted. Khrushchev is shown with Leonid Brezhnev (center), who succeeded the Russian leader when he was ousted by the Politburo in October 1964. Photo by Audrey Topping
In 1962 two of the author’s daughters were outfitted in a Moscow department store for attendance at a Russian school. Shown from left to right are the sales clerk, Lesley, Karen (Audrey Topping standing behind her), Robin, and Susan. Karen and Susan in Russian uniform were the first American children to attend a Soviet elementary school. Courtesy New York Times
The author is shown with Fidel Castro after interviewing the Cuban leader in Havana in 1983. Castro stood by his alliance with the Soviet Union but also said he could not understand why the United States was refusing to recognize his government since Washington had diplomatic relations with China which was also a Communist country. Topping was then managing editor of the New York Times. Courtesy author/Photo by Cuban government photographer
The Topping family is shown on a boat on Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay with their beloved Chinese junk, the Valhalla, in the background. The author was based in Hong Kong as the Times’ chief correspondent for Southeast Asia from 1963 to 1966, dividing his time between China watching and covering the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Courtesy author
American briefing in Saigon in 1964 during the Vietnam War. Author is shown at center. At his right is Pham Xuan An, a Time magazine correspondent who later confessed to be a spy for the North Vietnamese. Behind Topping on his right is Neil Sheehan of the United Press and later the New York Times; behind Topping on his left is Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press and later the Times; on Sheehan’s right is Tillman Durdin of the Times. Donated from collection of Horst Faass, photographer unknown.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia is shown on arrival at Phnom Penh airport in 1964 on the occasion of the Soviet delivery of jet fighter planes and other military equipment for his army. Audrey Topping is at right taking Sihanouk’s photo. Courtesy author
The author was challenged in 1965 by Prince Sihanouk to check out press reports which he disputed of North Vietnamese bases on the Cambodia border with vietnam. Topping traveled to the border jungle, led by Cambodian defense minister General Lon Nol, by helicopter, jeep, and on foot. Lon Nol is shown standing with cane while topping (at center) checks maps. Lon Nol later ousted Sihanouk as head of state in a coup. Courtesy author/Photo taken by Cambodian military
Major James Reid, decorated U.S. military intelligence officer, at a base in South Vietnam in 1967 during the Vietnam War. Reid discovered how Chinese-made missiles were being secretly landed on the Cambodian coast and then smuggled to North Vietnamese troops attacking South Vietnam. Courtesy James Reid
Indonesian president Sukarno visited Washington in 1961. He is shown at the White House, where he met with President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. Kennedy sought to wean Sukarno away from his ties to China and the Soviet Union with economic aid and support for the indonesian claim to West Irian (Dutch New Guinea). The American overtures failed, and by 1965 Sukarno was allied with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and had cemented his ties with China and North Vietnam. Courtesy Associated Press
Chinese premier Zhou Enlai hosted a reception in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in 1971 for Canadian ambassador Chester Ronning and his daughter Audrey Topping. The premier agreed at the reception to grant the author a visa to enter China. In 1966 Ambassador Ronning made two trips to Hanoi on behalf of the United States and Canada, seeking a negotiated end to the Vietnam War. Photo by Susan Topping/courtesy Audrey Topping
Audrey Topping riding in 1975 with the Kazaks while on assignment for the New York Times and National Geographic magazine in Xinjiang Province, western China. Photo by Chester Ronning/courtesy New York Times
Henry Kissinger visited former foreign minister Huang Hua in a Beijing hospital in 2008. On July 9, 1971, Huang Hua met Kissinger when he arrived on a secret mission to set up the visit of President Nixon. He escorted Kissinger to a meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai at which arrangements were made for the Nixon visit. Courtesy author, from private collection of Huang Hua
Audrey Topping’s missionary grandparents: Rev. Halvor Ronning and wife Hannah with their three children Chester (Audrey’s father, far left), Almah, and Neilius. This photo was taken in Xiangfan, Hubei, China, in 1899. Courtesy Audrey Topping
The author’s parents, Joseph and Anna Topolsky, immigrants from Russia, shortly after their marriage in New York in 1916. As a young girl, Anna was witness to the pogrom murder of her mother by Cossack horsemen in a Jewish ghetto village in the Ukraine. Courtesy author
Menfolk of the author’s family in a photo taken in Kobryn on the Polish-Russian border. Author’s father, Joseph, is the boy at the left; Joseph’s father is directly above him in cap and white shirt. Joseph immigrated to the United States in 1912 at the age of eighteen. One of two brothers he left behind and other members of his family were lost in the Holocaust. Courtesy author
The Topping daughters, who traveled the world with their working parents. Clockwise from left: Karen and Lesley, born in London; Susan, born in Saigon; Robin, born in Berlin; and Joanna, born in New York. In Moscow, Russians would jokingly accuse the Toppings of bias because they did not have a child born while stationed there. Photo by Patrick Vingo
