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FOREIGN EDITOR

In the first seven months of 1966 I had reported on momentous events in China, Indochina, and Indonesia. Before the year was out, I was to be involved in yet another momentous story, but in another role. In August, after three years in Southeast Asia, I was transferred from Hong Kong to Bonn. On arrival in the German capital, Audrey and I stuffed the brood into the Schaumburgerhof Hotel, the four kids, three cats, two turtles, and Charlie, the Australian cockatoo. I was not too happy about my assignment to Bonn, despite the hint from Sydney Gruson, then the foreign news editor, that I was being positioned for greater things in the paper’s hierarchy. I was bored by the prospect of a second time around in Germany. Although important as the capital of West Germany, Bonn still seemed pretty much of a sleepy backwater compared with the seething divided Berlin I had known in the 1950s.

On our first day in Bonn, I took Audrey out to the swift-flowing Rhine to see the heavy barge traffic so as to rid her of a lingering dream. In Hong Kong, she had frantically researched—despite my shrugs—the possibility of transporting our beloved Chinese junk, Valhalla, from Repulse Bay to a mooring at Bonn. Our first week was preoccupied with putting our older daughters, Susan and Karen, into school, outfitting them with lederhosen and bicycles, buying a car, and renting a house. The night before we were to move in, I awoke to the ringing of the wall telephone in an alcove of our hotel room. I became fully awake when I heard the voice of Clifton Daniel, the managing editor, in his courtly southern drawl with a slight tease, saying: “Mr. Topping, would you like to become foreign editor of the New York Times?” I mumbled: “Just a moment,” and sticking my head into the adjoining bedroom, called out to Audrey: “Do I want to be foreign editor . . . go back to New York?” Audrey replied with typical aplomb: “You do,” turned over, and went back to sleep.

I gave up the life of a correspondent reluctantly. I did so only because I came to accept that after traveling abroad as a reporter for twenty years it was time to put my experience to use as an editor. I did not forswear the role of foreign correspondent entirely. Over the course of the next twenty years, as foreign editor and later managing editor, I seized every opportunity to write for the daily newspaper and the New York Times Magazine. Traveling every continent, I interviewed such personalities as President Nicolae Ceauescu of Romania, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa, the Shah of Iran, Fidel Castro, Premier Zhou Enlai, Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel, and King Hussein of Jordan. Audrey accompanied me as a freelance photojournalist and writer as she had in Asia and in the Soviet Union. There were also weeks when I was left behind in New York to mind the kids while she sallied abroad. She worked for the New York Times and the National Geographic magazine, among other publications, and also did television documentaries for NBC on the Kremlin and the Forbidden City in Peking.

Daniel asked me to be in New York to take up my new job as foreign editor within ten days. Only a few days short of our two-week sojourn in Bonn, we left for the airport in a taxi convoy—my wife, pregnant with our fifth daughter, our other four daughters, cats, turtles, and the talking cockatoo. A bewildered taxi driver asked me: “Is this a traveling circus?” I nodded with a straight face and a sigh. At Kennedy Airport, upon our arrival well after midnight, a customs official surveyed our motley caravan incredulously and waved us through, not taking account of a current ban on the importation of parrots, and without checking our wicker and rattan cases loaded with contraband Chinese goods obtained in Hong Kong. Our destination was a village unknown to us called Scarsdale, recommended on the telephone by our former China colleague, Henry Lieberman, as a decent place to live.

Two days after arrival, upon checking into the Times newsroom, Clifton Daniel informed me I was to be fully briefed by Sydney Gruson, the departing foreign news editor. Moments later, Gruson, wearing a bright bow tie and carrying a suitcase, bustled in and ushered me into an adjoining room. Gruson told me with a sigh of his troubles with the Internal Revenue Service, and as I listened waiting rather impatiently for my briefing, he suddenly glanced at his watch and cried out: “Good God! I’ve got to get to the airport,” and left for Paris, where he was to become publisher of the international edition of the Times. I walked back into the newsroom and sat down at my new desk. I was the foreign editor of the New York Times, with a staff of more than forty correspondents stationed around the world. Fortunately, I had been in most of the places where we had bureaus, and so the transition sans briefing by my predecessor from the field to the Foreign Desk was not overwhelming. I was given full control of the international news operation. Cyrus Sulzberger no longer had oversight responsibility for the foreign staff. The publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, had in 1955 stripped his cousin of that function when he was recycled from chief correspondent to columnist. Cyrus Sulzberger still roamed the world writing for his column, “Foreign Affairs,” but he could no longer dictate to the staff in his imperious style. That pleased me immensely, recalling his cable of 1948 denying me a job with the Times. In tacit recognition that I was in full control of international operations, my title was changed from foreign news editor to foreign editor.

My first major challenge as foreign editor was not long in coming. On the morning of December 15, a copy boy dropped a cablegram on my desk. I glanced at it and then seized it and studied it. I walked across the newsroom and placed it on the desk of Harrison Salisbury, then an assistant managing editor, and said: “Does this say what I think it does?” Salisbury examined it. There was something of a garble in the transmission. “Yes,” Salisbury said, “I think it does.” I exclaimed: “You’re in.” A visa to North Vietnam awaited Salisbury in Paris. For months, circling the periphery of the Communist bloc, he had explored every means to gain entry into embattled North Vietnam. He was not alone. While covering the de Gaulle visit to Cambodia, I encountered Wilfred Burchett, the leftist Australian correspondent who had close ties to the North Vietnamese. I sought his help in getting visas for Salisbury and me. Salisbury got the nod. To pick up his visa Salisbury left for Paris, with only Daniel, the managing editor, Turner Catledge, the executive editor, a few other need-to-know people, and me privy to his undertaking. John Oakes, editor of the editorial page, later complained about not being included in those briefed. In Paris Salisbury found that the message from Hanoi concerning the visa had been mislaid in our Paris office and so was delayed for the better part of a month in reaching me. Salisbury traveled to Vietnam via Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Vientiane, Laos, aboard a plane of the International Control Commission and arrived in Hanoi on December 22. From that day to January 17, Salisbury filed some of the most significant and controversial dispatches of the Vietnam War.

On arrival in Hanoi, Salisbury set out at once to learn the results of the American air strikes on North Vietnam that had occurred on September 13 and 14. The North Vietnamese contended that the center of Hanoi had been bombed. The Pentagon denied it, saying the bombers had hit legitimate targets in the industrial outskirts rather than the urban areas. In his first dispatch, filed on Christmas Eve after viewing a number of sites where houses had been damaged by bombing or rocket fire inflicting civilian casualties, Salisbury stated: “Contrary to the impression given by United States communiqués, on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its environs for some time.”

The first site that Salisbury visited was in the area of Pho Nguyen Thiep Street in the Hoan Kiem quarter of Hanoi, a three-minute drive from the old Metropole Hotel, so familiar to me from my stays there in the 1950s. He reported that about three hundred thatch and brick homes and huts along the Red River embankment, possibly a quarter of a mile from Nguyen Thiep Street, were hit on December 13. On that site, he reported, four persons had been killed and ten injured, most of them while at work or hiding in a large shelter. The damaged houses lay along the western approaches to the key Paul Doumer (Long Bien) Bridge, and Salisbury speculated that American pilots possibly were aiming at the approaches to the bridge just outside the Hanoi city limits. Salisbury also inspected a house on Hue Lane in the Halba Quarter that had been hit on December 2, and he reported the death there of one person and the wounding of seven others, including two children. Perhaps because he had been witness to the destruction of the German blitz of London in World War II, he cited the casualties and damage in Hanoi as relatively light.

His reporting rendered its great impact in its implication that the Pentagon had been lying and misleading the American public in asserting that the so-called precision bombing had not hit the urban areas or caused civilian casualties. Salisbury also interviewed Premier Pham Van Dong, quoting him as declaring that North Vietnam was ready to fight for another twenty years to prevail in its “sacred war,” an assertion that undercut predictions made by the Johnson administration that the North Vietnamese would bend to American power.

The Salisbury dispatches, published at a time of bitter divisive debate in the country over the administration’s conduct of the Vietnam War, produced an enormous uproar. The Pentagon and the State Department challenged the credibility of Salisbury’s reporting. Arthur Sylvester, the Pentagon press secretary, referred to the New York Times as “The new Hanoi Times.” His office conceded that some of Salisbury’s observations might prove to be correct but charged that his reports, which lacked attribution, were based on North Vietnamese propaganda. Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a late-night phone call to Arthur Sulzberger, asking the publisher pointedly if Salisbury was asking the right questions. “I hope so,” Sulzberger replied. After the call, Sulzberger telephoned Daniel and asked him to contact Rusk and obtain from him any questions that he would have Salisbury put to the North Vietnamese. Rusk furnished a list of questions which were sent to Salisbury unmarked as to their source, but it arrived too late. When Salisbury returned to the United States, he met with Rusk and reported that Pham Van Dong had indicated, as the Vietnamese premier had conveyed more explicitly earlier to Chester Ronning, that Hanoi might be more amenable to peace negotiations if the United States halted the bombing of the North unconditionally.

The Washington Post among many others in the media questioned the reliability of Salisbury’s reports, asserting that his casualty figures, which lacked attribution, were similar to those contained in Communist propaganda pamphlets. Daniel retorted in a statement: “It was apparent in Mr. Salisbury’s first dispatch—and he so stated in a subsequent dispatch—that the casualty figures came from North Vietnamese officials. Where else could he get such figures in Hanoi?” Very privately, Daniel summed up the uproar in a memo to executive editor Catledge, who was abroad, noting that “the Publisher was perturbed” about Salisbury’s dispatches, and detailed how he was handling the nationwide fire storm which they had ignited. “Getting into Hanoi was a journalistic coup,” Daniel said. “Harrison, as might be expected, very promptly dug up some interesting facts that weren’t known before. He disclosed that there was considerably more damage to civilian areas than Washington was quick to acknowledge that this was so. At the same time, he obviously gave comfort to North Vietnam by affording an outlet for its propaganda and the point of view, and comfort to those who are opposed to the bombing, and opposed to the war . . . and as you know, Harrison has complicated matters by failing in his first dispatches to attribute casualty statistics and other controversial information directly to those from whom he received it. I asked him in a telegram to do this, and he has subsequently complied . . . The desk was instructed not to print anything without attribution or, if the attribution was obvious, as it was in most cases, they should simply put it in.”

Daniel, who had begun to read Salisbury’s dispatches before they were published, instructed editors in another memorandum to do “everything we can in coming weeks to balance the Salisbury reports.” The Times then ran a front-page story by Hanson W. Baldwin, our military analyst, who was one of the most vociferous critics of Salisbury’s reporting. He quoted Pentagon sources describing Salisbury’s accounts as “grossly exaggerated.” On all sides, by Washington officials and the media, the challenges to Salisbury’s reporting centered on lack of specific attribution.

In one of the most frustrating turns of my career as foreign editor, I was absent from New York when Salisbury did his reporting. I was at home in Scarsdale on Christmas Day and then left on a long-planned first tour of our bureaus in Eastern and Western Europe. After my return to New York on January 24, I was apprised of some of the details of how Salisbury’s dispatches had been handled by the Foreign Desk. But it was not until September 2007, more than forty years later, that I learned for the first time precisely what happened on the Foreign Desk on Christmas Eve when Salisbury’s first dispatch landed. Possibly to avoid embarrassing some of the desk editors on duty that night, the full account had been withheld from the top editors.

I learned the full story when I met with Evan Jenkins, who had been on the Foreign Desk on that Christmas Eve and handled Salisbury’s copy. Jenkins thereafter had become one of my assistant foreign editors and later became a senior editor on the paper’s central News Desk. At our reunion he was consulting editor, the chief copy editor, of the Columbia Journalism Review. There was a standing joke between me and Jenkins, an old friend, that he had spoken to me after midnight more often than my wife. When I served as assistant managing editor and later managing editor, Jenkins, working on the News Desk during what is called in newsroom jargon the “night trick,” would call me if there was a major news break or a question of changing the front page of the newspaper.

I met Jenkins, at his suggestion, at a bistro near the Columbia campus, where he told me his untold story. Salisbury’s first report from Hanoi arrived late Saturday, Christmas Eve, after the close of the first edition. The article was published in the late editions of Sunday, Christmas Day, and evoked no manifest stir, possibly because it had not made the first edition, which was the edition normally distributed in Washington. The dispatch was not seen in the capital until the next day. Yet there was another reason why the dispatch did not immediately evoke controversy. The copy editor assigned to handle Salisbury’s first dispatch was Evan, who had joined the Times only six months earlier from the Long Island newspaper Newsday. As he read it, he became deeply concerned by the lack of attribution for some key aspects of the dispatch. He found himself confronted with both journalistic and personal dilemmas. Here he was, editing the work of not only one of the Times’s most brilliant and experienced reporters—Salisbury had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for his reporting from Moscow—but also someone who was an assistant managing editor. Ironically, one of Salisbury’s routine duties in the newsroom was to provide Clifton Daniel, the managing editor, with a postmortem of the previous day’s paper for the purpose of spotting and culling out just the kind of flaws that Jenkins now saw in the Salisbury dispatch. Fully aware that the dispatch, once published, given the heated debate in the United States on Vietnam policy, would draw the most critical inspection, Jenkins balked at signing off on it. Consultations then took place with many-sided implications. Jenkins pointed out to his supervisor on the desk, Cleve Mathews, that Salisbury was reporting details about the American bombings that he could not possibly know through personal observation yet he had not attributed the reports. Jenkins had just been advised by another supervisor, the desk slot man, as he was handed the Salisbury dispatch for editing: “Evan, it’s my experience that the best way to deal with Salisbury’s copy is to hook the paragraphs, fix the syntax, and otherwise leave it alone.” Agitated, Jenkins told Mathews that he would rather quit than put the dispatch into the paper in its existing form. Mathews then took the copy to Larry Hauck, the editor in charge of the paper that night. He was a member of what was known then as the Bullpen, composed of the most senior news editors. When Hauck came to him on the desk rim, Jenkins pointed out several of the flaws in the copy. Hauck said: “Edit the damn thing the way it needs to be edited.” Jenkins then inserted phrases in the dispatch which made it clear that much of the information about casualties and damage Salisbury was reporting came from the North Vietnamese. He also bracketed in a paragraph which quoted a State Department acknowledgment, issued just two days earlier, that the possibility of accidental bombing could not be ruled out. The changes made the story acceptable in keeping with the Times’s journalistic standards.

Two dispatches from Salisbury, which Jenkins did not edit, arrived subsequently on Monday, December 26, one having been filed the day before but delayed in transmission. Both were published in the paper of Tuesday, December 27, but this time the “leave it alone” approach apparently prevailed, and there were no insertions of attribution.

Waiting for me in late January upon my return from my trip was a rather anguished note, dated Monday night (December 26) from Jenkins. It turned out that he had not read the second and third dispatches, had not edited them, and had not seen them until late that night. In his memo, with a tear sheet from the Tuesday paper attached, Jenkins said: “I am enclosing samples of what I consider to be unfortunate reporting. In the places I’ve encircled, it seems to me Salisbury is reporting conclusions and not known fact.” But he added: “I ought to make it clear that I’m inclined to accept almost everything he said, including the conclusions.”

After our talk that September afternoon in 2007 when he told me his story, Jenkins sent me four documents. One was a recap of what he told me. With it was a clip of Salisbury’s first dispatch with penciled markings of the editing done by him. Another was a copy of the Monday, December 26, memo he sent me, which had been lost in the files of forty years ago.

Despite the challenges to his reporting, Salisbury’s dispatches swelled the growing public opposition to the war and heightened distrust of the claims of progress being made by the White House and the Pentagon. The historian Barbara Tuchman would later comment in her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, that after Salisbury’s reporting from North Vietnam, “Johnson’s ratings in the polls for handling of the war slid into the negative and would never again regain a majority of support.” But the attribution issue probably cost Salisbury a Pulitzer Prize, an accolade which I believe he deserved for his enterprise and the substance of his reporting. Turner Catledge was serving on the Pulitzer Prize Board when Salisbury lost out in the voting. The board turned aside the 4–1 recommendation of the International Reporting Jury and voted 6–5 against the Salisbury entry. In his memoir My Life and The Times, Catledge, who had recused himself from the deliberations in keeping with the board’s conflict-of-interest rules, said he believed that members of the board who were supporting the war had voted against Salisbury for political reasons. However, he conceded that the Times had made an editorial slip in that Salisbury provided no attribution for the figures on civilian casualties in his first dispatch, making himself vulnerable to his critics. He argued that apart from personal observations, the information in Salisbury’s dispatch obviously could come only from the North Vietnamese. He noted that the rest of the fourteen dispatches which Salisbury filed from Hanoi and the eight from Hong Kong were adequately attributed. Catledge himself erred in his memoir. The lack of attribution which drew fire was not in the first dispatch, edited by Jenkins, but in the two that arrived next, which were published as filed.

The fourth document which Jenkins sent me was a copy of a letter he sent on December 16, 1996, to John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s, in connection with an article MacArthur was writing for the Columbia Journalism Review. It said, in part: “Topping, who had finished a foreign correspondent’s career when he became foreign editor earlier in 1966, was also nominated for a Pulitzer prize that year for a series reporting on the slaughter of supposed Communists in Indonesia. I remember that it was very good. I was the grunt editor on that one, too. The Pulitzer advisory board, having rejected Salisbury even though he should have been a shoo-in, could hardly give the prize to another Times entry. So the prize for 1966 went to a Christian Science Monitor correspondent [John Hughes] for his coverage, as it happened, of the slaughter in Indonesia.”

Three months after I met with Jenkins, I was devastated when I received a message from David Jones, the former national editor of the Times, informing me that Jenkins had died of cancer. Evan had not told me that he was terminally ill. He had arranged to meet with me before his death, evidently because he wanted to be sure that I knew and perhaps would record the full details of what happened that Christmas Eve in the Times newsroom. At a memorial gathering several days after Evan’s death, I recounted his story to his family and friends. I told them that Evan was the kind of editor that made the New York Times a great newspaper.

On November 30, 1966, two months after my appointment as foreign editor, I wrote to Clifton Daniel in effect asking for a mandate to undertake a major reform of the foreign news report and restructuring of the desk. In my memorandum to him, I said: “As the world becomes more complex, our reporting tasks multiply and the competition for space increases correspondingly. To fulfill our function as the paper of record, we should progressively become more selective as to the detail we publish. We must also develop appropriate forms of summary reporting if we are to open space for the growing number of subjects that demand attention. The social, intellectual and technological revolutions are moving nations more than politics and our report does not adequately reflect that perspective. Too much detail is slipping into papers, which is of ephemeral interest and does not significantly inform or stimulate our readers.”

The mandate I requested for change was forthcoming from Daniel, who had been a correspondent in London and Moscow and saw the need for reform of our foreign news operations. A significant paring of the foreign report, which I instituted immediately, was to dispense with the lengthy texts of diplomatic notes exchanged among nations, which had been a hallmark of the Times as the paper of record but, I felt, added very little to our readers’ understanding of events.

My reshaping of the report began in 1967 with a restructuring of the Foreign News Copy Desk in New York. The Foreign Desk I inherited was staffed with editors who seemed to function in the most routine, dispirited manner. I ruled strictly against copy editors tampering with the substance of a story, but I expected them to do more than correct punctuation and spelling. There was often a need to go back to correspondents on their stories to close gaps, question unsubstantiated assertions, fix the structure of a piece, or ask for follow-ups. But treated often by Times executives as little more than a collection of hacks—not an unusual attitude toward copy editors at many newspapers—our Foreign Desk editors often hesitated to engage with reporters in the field. Curious about these faceless people on the rim, I asked each to submit a detailed personal résumé. To my delight, I found these unknowns were possessed of an extraordinary range of talents and expertise. While earning a living on the copy desk, some were employed part-time as teachers or writers and editors at other publications. One of the most outstanding of the editors was Allan Siegal, who handled the critical late-night trick. Siegal left the paper for a time to join ABC, but I was instrumental in bringing him back to the Foreign Desk. It was an act I look back at with great satisfaction. Siegal eventually became an assistant managing editor serving as the longtime arbiter of style and standards in the copy editing of the paper. Looking to exploit my newly discovered resources on the Foreign News Desk, I assigned each of the copy editors to work as an area specialist and arranged opportunities for them to do independent research. Enjoying greater mutual respect, editors and reporters began working more closely together. The copy showed very marked improvement, and there was a greater flow of story ideas.

In June 1968, following the restructuring of the desk, I distributed a lengthy memorandum entitled “Foreign Desk Guidelines” designed to govern the content of the report and asked all correspondents to comment. It covered everything from the techniques of interpretive reporting, to the structure of stories, to closer collaboration with the copy desk. At the core of the guidelines was the statement:

To survive in the competition with electronic media, news magazines and the suburban press, which are attracting an increasing share of public attention, we must offer something more. If we are to remain the leader in foreign news reporting, we must add new facts and dimensions to our coverage. Specifically, what can The New York Times, with its unique staff, resources and public service tradition, do to better serve the reader? Governments will determine in large measure whether mankind can solve its great problems of security, law and material wellbeing, and, therefore, we should remain deeply concerned with the conduct of governmental affairs. However, we can be less preoccupied with the daily official rhetoric of the capitals. We should report more about how the peoples live, and what they and their societies look like, how their institutions and systems operate. Our report should reflect more fully the social, cultural, intellectual, scientific and technological revolutions, which, more than the political, are transforming the world society. And to comprehend, our readers must have more than sophisticated interpretive writing.

To give correspondents more latitude I developed the concept of the “Takeout,” a new form of special article ranging in length from one to three columns written to add perspective, depth, and understanding to a subject. It did not require a strong spot news peg and therefore broadened coverage in such underreported regions as Latin America and Africa. The staff responded extraordinarily well to the new approach incorporated in the guidelines, and the report took on a more comprehensive and modern cast.

The final stage in the transformation of the report was completed when a tall, smiling, very likeable man began browsing about my desk. He was Walter Mattson, the paper’s newly appointed production manager. He was doing what the previous publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had forbidden. To guard the independence of the News Department, Sulzberger erected what was dubbed the “Chinese Wall.” It separated the News Department from the Editorial Department, which produced the opinion pages, and also barred business executives from the third-floor newsroom and any interference with the news report. Mattson, who eventually became president of the paper, was the first business executive to venture over the wall, and I was his first collaborator. I had been railing against the hodgepodge manner in which the foreign report was presented in the paper. In keeping with tradition, the foreign report was printed in the first pages of the main section followed in order by the national report, metropolitan news, financial, and sports. However, the foreign stories were simply dumped into the paper, being positioned haphazardly between ads according to the requirements of the Advertising and Production departments. Mattson offered a solution. He persuaded his advertising and production colleagues on December 12, 1968, to grant me a choice display space fixed across the top of page 3 and arranged for other fixed “holes” in following pages. The new layouts improved the presentation of the foreign report immensely. This design was adhered to through the following years. During those years I moved up in 1969 to become assistant managing editor and deputy to Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor. In 1977, I became managing editor when Rosenthal was appointed executive editor in charge of both the News Department and the Sunday Department. Working as team with Arthur Gelb, the metropolitan editor, Louis Silverstein, the highly talented staff designer, and on the business side, Mattson and John Pomfret, the general manager, we transformed the daily Times into a four-section paper. It was made up of a first section containing foreign and national news, the editorial page, and a facing Op-Ed page; the second section was devoted to New York metropolitan news; the third was made up of alternating sections devoted to lifestyle, culture, and sports; the fourth, to business under the title Business Day. This four-section paper became a model for newspapers throughout the country. Attracting new readers and advertisers, it made the Times highly profitable after a period in the 1970s when it was close to operating at a loss. The transformation was made possible by the courage and vision of the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who agreed to invest heavily in the changes although the Times company was then under the most severe economic strain.

This design of the Times changed radically in 2009 under executive editor Bill Keller. Page 3 of the first section was given over to the continuation (called “jumps” in newspaper parlance) of stories beginning on the front page. The introduction to the foreign news report was moved to a page further inside. This switch was part of a broad reconfiguration of the paper in which pages were shifted and sections merged in order to reduce production costs and open premium space for advertising. The four-section design was abandoned. The Times like virtually all newspapers was suffering financially by the migration of advertisers and readers to the Internet. Viewing the paper from my retirement observation post, I accepted the urgent need to reduce costs and attract more advertising. I was grateful that the changes did not impact on the essential quality of the foreign news report. Nevertheless, I was pained by the decision to relegate the introduction to the foreign news report, long regarded as the “jewel” of the Times, to a less prominent position. I was more troubled by the change in the character of the front page which accompanied the structural redesign.

From 1970, serving then as assistant managing editor, to 1987, when I retired as managing editor, I chaired the 4 P.M. news conference at which the front page of the paper is designed. Seated with Rosenthal, who became executive editor in 1977, together with other senior news editors and the departmental chiefs, we made up the front according to a traditional format. What we judged to be the lead, the most important story of the day, was positioned in the far right column, with the story second in importance generally as the off-lead in the far left column. Stories were then positioned down the page in what we considered to be the descending order of importance, allowing at times for a news analysis piece or an interesting feature at the bottom. The Associated Press reported daily on the makeup of the front page, which many newspaper editors across the country used as a guide in composing their own front pages.

Under Bill Keller’s editorial direction, the front page evolved from its traditional hard news format into a page given over in great part to stories with a feature-type approach. Apart from the lead fixed in column 6 on the right side, stories were positioned in no consistent recognizable order. On the bottom of the page, there were brief referrals (“reefers”) to articles and editorial commentaries on inside pages. Whatever may have been gained by this “soft news” approach in competition with Internet Web sites which give priority to hard late-breaking new, the front page of the print edition of the Times, in my view, suffered the loss of an important attribute. It no longer serves the public as the oft-quoted daily guide to what Times editors gauge to be the most important events of the day. The AP no longer reports daily on the makeup of the Times front page.

My tenure as foreign editor ended in 1969 when I moved up to the job of assistant managing editor. This move pitched me into the center of a succession dispute which threw the hierarchy of the paper into turmoil. In July 1969, when the succession crisis was moving toward resolution, I was at the Foreign Desk one afternoon just outside the executive editor’s office when Scotty Reston emerged and walked past me silently to a nearby book stand on which rested an unabridged dictionary. I looked at Reston uneasily and wondered if I should speak to him, try to mend our relations, which had deteriorated. I had long admired Reston for his work as a columnist in Washington, sharing a view held by many that he ranked with Walter Lippmann as one of the most outstanding journalists of his generation. My relations with Reston had become somewhat strained several weeks after he came up from Washington to replace Turner Catledge as executive editor. I was at a dinner in August 1968 in Connecticut when I received word that Soviet bloc armies had invaded Czechoslovakia to eclipse the “Prague Spring,” a period of liberalization introduced by Communist Party leader Alexander Dubek. I drove back to the office and found Reston with several news editors debating what they should do about coverage. I listened impatiently for a several minutes and then said: “Okay, amateur night is over. I’ll take it from here.” Reston stalked way furious. I later regretted this arrogance on my part. But on this particular morning Reston was cool to me for reasons that went far beyond the irritations of that incident. His demeanor related to the succession dispute.

The affair began with decision of the publisher to appoint A. M. Rosenthal as managing editor. Before becoming assistant managing editor, Abe had served as metropolitan editor, and earlier as a correspondent performing brilliantly in Poland, India, and Japan. For his reporting from Poland he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1960, the citation taking note of the fact that he had been expelled by the Communist regime, not for erroneous reporting, but for “the depth of his reporting into Polish affairs.” On the day Punch Sulzberger decided to appoint Rosenthal as managing editor, Reston, without informing the publisher or Rosenthal, telephoned Anthony Lewis, the bureau chief in London, and offered him the position of assistant managing editor. Reached at the opera during an intermission, Tony unhesitatingly accepted the job as deputy, which meant he would become second in command of the News Department. He agreed to come to New York at once. Reston had acted unaware that Rosenthal already had decided to appoint me as his deputy. Selecting me had not been easy for Rosenthal. It meant bypassing his closest friend, Arthur Gelb, the very talented metropolitan editor, who very much wanted the job and later complained in his memoir City Room that he had felt betrayed.

Reminiscing years later in an interview about the affair with John Stacks, Reston’s biographer, Rosenthal said: “I passed over Arthur Gelb, a very close friend, because we were both emotional and excitable. I chose Topping. There were things I was very good at, and things, I wasn’t good at. Topping was very good. You didn’t fuck around with Topping. He did not invite arguments. There was a quality of organization that he had. I thought we would be a very good team.”

When Reston summoned Rosenthal to his office to congratulate him on his appointment as managing editor, the meeting was amicable until Rosenthal told him he had selected me as his deputy. Reston, very upset, disclosed he had offered the job to Tony Lewis. Rosenthal registered his opposition with no shortages of expletives, and when he left Reston’s office, he felt his pending appointment as managing editor was very much in doubt. To mediate, Sulzberger summoned a meeting at which Reston accused Rosenthal of “wanting to do everything himself.” Still raging, Rosenthal did not budge. The publisher, buffeted between his two senior news executives, made no decision. But when Lewis turned up in the office the following day, Punch told him: “Abe has decided he wants Top, and if he wants Top, he will have him.” In compensation Lewis was offered, and accepted, a position as a columnist on the Op-Ed page, a job he was eminently suited for and one in which he achieved great distinction.

I had all of this in mind as I looked at Reston flipping the pages of the dictionary. Eager to make peace, I braced myself and went up to him. He glanced at me and said: “The power thing is over,” and went back to turning the pages. I retreated to my desk. As he made plain, the shuffling in the hierarchy had been a “power thing” for Reston. Lewis had worked in the Washington Bureau and was one of a group there dubbed “Scotty’s boys.” Appointment of Lewis as assistant managing editor would have given Reston greater influence in the News Department and positioned Lewis as a possible successor to Rosenthal as managing editor. At the end of July, Sulzberger announced formally that Rosenthal was named managing editor succeeding Clifton Daniel, who became associate editor, and I was named assistant managing editor. Reston, unwilling to forgo writing his column and uncomfortable working in New York as a hands-on executive, elected to return to Washington as a vice president.

In the two decades I served as an editor at the Times, perhaps my most enjoyable years were spent on the Foreign Desk, working with correspondents and deeply involved daily with international news. One of the most challenging requirements of the job was selecting and preparing reporters to cover the wars in Indochina. I would brief them, deeply concerned about their safety, and tell them of my own field experience if it seemed useful. In the end what counted most, of course, was not my advice but their intelligence, discretion, courage, and luck.

Gloria Emerson was among the superb reporters that I was privileged to send to Vietnam. Emerson turned to me repeatedly seeking a Vietnam assignment. There was hesitancy among some of the executives about sending a woman to cover the war and particularly Emerson, who was regarded as quite emotional and fragile although she had done well in covering the Northern Ireland violence and the Nigerian civil war. I managed to clear the way for her, and she was sent to Vietnam in 1970 by Jim Greenfield, my successor as foreign editor. She performed brilliantly for two years, providing a profoundly human aspect to our Vietnam report that conveyed more poignantly the cruelty and hopelessness of the war. When she sent me her book Winners and Losers, a personal copy in which she had scribbled some second thoughts, she wrote on the flyleaf: “For Seymour Topping, the best Foreign Editor of them all, who started me on the long road, and who has my gratitude and respect.” I treasured that note as a signature to my years as foreign editor.

Working as assistant managing editor to the talented, innovative Abe Rosenthal was a most fulfilling experience particularly in our creation of the four-section paper. But it also had its onerous turns. Several months after taking on the job of being his deputy I suffered one of my more unhappy journalistic experiences. In 1970 I contacted Edgar Snow by phone in China and asked him to do an article for the Times. He was traveling with Huang Hua and had been interviewing Chinese leaders. On October 1 he had been at the side of Mao Zedong on the rostrum of the Tiananmen Gate during the celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It was Mao’s way of recognizing the American who had done more than anyone else beginning in the 1930s to bring the Chinese Communist movement to world attention. I was delighted to be in touch with Snow. As I have mentioned earlier, I had read Snow’s Red Star over China while a senior in high school, just after it was published in 1938, and his epic adventures heightened my resolve to become a correspondent in China. In 1939 I followed Snow’s career path by entering the University of Missouri to study journalism. After my telephone contact with Snow, I met his wife, Lois Wheeler Snow, in December when she was passing through New York, and I reiterated to her my interest in an article. Before leaving China for the United States to visit her daughter, who was a freshman at Antioch College, Lois had stood beside Mao and her husband on the Tiananmen Gate rostrum viewing the festivities. Edgar Snow submitted an article to us in February after his trip to China from his home in Geneva. He had made his family home in Switzerland, fleeing the umbrage directed by conservative critics against many China specialists in the press, the State Department, and academia during the McCarthy period and the Cold War.

The article Snow sent us was very lengthy and based largely on a series of interviews with Premier Zhou Enlai. Jim Greenfield, who had replaced me as foreign editor, and Rosenthal joined me in reviewing the piece. Rosenthal found the article overly long and propagandistic in some of its aspects. Strongly anti-Communist since his tour as a correspondent in Poland, Rosenthal was uneasy about giving too much space to an article by a journalist known to be very sympathetic to the Chinese Communists. He insisted on drastic cuts. Snow was resistant to making any cuts and asserted that none be made without his prior approval. He had assured Zhou Enlai that no cuts would be made in his answers to questions. I was eager to go forward with publication. Although the article was, in fact, lengthier than what was usually deemed acceptable in the Times format, it contained unique insights into the thinking of the Chinese leadership and clearly indicated that there was an open door to exchanges with the Nixon administration for an improvement in relations. At the time we were not aware that the article reflected the attitude of Mao Zedong, which had been conveyed to Snow in off-the-record remarks. The Snow article thus contained one of the first signals that Peking was ready to do business with the Nixon administration. Unable to elicit Snow’s agreement to his proposed cuts, Rosenthal summarily rejected the article.

It fell to me unhappily to telephone Snow that night, rousing him from sleep to tell him that the Times would not publish his article. Despite my regrets proffered in anguished terms, Snow was furious. His fury extended later to instructing his agent to do no further business with the Times. Lois withdrew an Op-Ed piece about to be published ruminating about Peking street scenes. In the end, the affair proved costly in competitive journalistic terms to the Times. The New Republic published the Snow article starting in March in a five-part series. But it was to Life magazine that Snow gave his great China scoops. He turned to Life because the popular magazine would afford him the broad audience denied to him by the Times. Since the death in 1967 of publisher Henry Luce, a leading member of the China Lobby, Life had become a more freewheeling publication. In April, Life published a lengthy Snow article which commanded wide attention quoting Mao as stating that he would be happy to talk with Nixon “either as a tourist or as President” and that “the problems between China and the U.S.A. would have to be solved with Nixon.” Snow felt free at that point to reveal details of his off-the-record interview with Mao because prospects had ripened for dialogue between Peking and Washington. Zhou Enlai had made an opening gambit by inviting an American ping-pong team to China. Speculation about the Snow article, whose substance some American officials had questioned, ended on July 16 when Nixon announced that Kissinger had returned from a secret visit to Peking and that he had accepted an invitation for a presidential visit to China. Overnight, Snow and his book Red Star over China became extremely hot properties. On July 30, Life published another Snow article headlined “What China Wants from Nixon’s Visit.” The portrait of a smiling Zhou Enlai on the cover of the magazine was a photograph taken by Audrey during her father’s conversation with Zhou Enlai in May in the Great Hall of the People.

In December, Snow entered a hospital in Switzerland to undergo an operation for cancer. Zhou Enlai sent a team of doctors and nurses to Snow’s home in Geneva hoping he would agree to return to China for treatment. The Chinese medical group was led by George Hatem, his old friend from Yenan days. Hatem and Huang Hua, then the permanent representative of China to the United Nations, went together to Snow’s bedside. Pleasantly surprised, Snow exclaimed: “Well, we three bandits.” “Bandits” was the propaganda epithet used by Chiang Kai-shek during the Civil War in describing Mao’s Eighth Route Army. Snow slipped into a coma not long after the visit and died in the early morning of February 15, less than three days before President Nixon enplaned for Peking.

In my book Journey between Two Chinas, published in the year of his death, I said of Snow: “Like so many of his colleagues in the field, I am bereaved by the death this year of Edgar Snow, and I salute his pioneering research and his reporting, which have been of so much value to us.” Among my many great regrets at his passing: I never had a chance to thank him for what he had done for a kid from the Bronx.