The artillery thundered through the night but now at dawn fell silent. It was January 7, 1949. I lay awake beneath the cotton blanket atop the sacks of grain in the Chinese peasant hut listening, wondering what the silence portended. Then, I groped in the darkness toward the doorway but retreated when I came face to face with a soldier, his carbine leveled. I was a prisoner of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), held in a hut near the battlefield where 130,000 of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were encircled by 300,000 of Mao Zedong’s forces. I would soon learn that the abrupt halt in the gunfire meant that the trapped Nationalists had surrendered. It was the end of the Battle of the Huai-Hai. In running engagements across the frozen Huaipei Plain of Central China, Chiang Kai-shek had in sixty-five days lost more than a half million of his troops. Mao Zedong’s triumph in the decades-long Civil War had thus become a certainty.
A correspondent for the Associated Press, I had ventured across the Nationalist front lines into the no-man’s-land of the Huaipei Plain bent on reaching Mao’s headquarters, to seek an interview and cover the advance of his armies on Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. Intercepted by Communist guerrillas, I was led on foot and horseback to the hut on the edge of the battlefield, put under guard, my typewriter and camera confiscated. On that morning when the gunfire ceased, the Communist political commissar who had interrogated me upon my arrival two days earlier reentered the hut. “We ask you to return,” he said. “The horses are outside the door.” When I protested, demanding to know the outcome of my request for an interview with Mao Zedong, the commissar shook his head impatiently and stalked out. I paced the hut and in frustration beat my fist against a stack of grain stalks. So, Mao would not receive me. The victor was no longer talking to Americans.
That was the defining moment for me in the tumultuous years of 1946–80 when I covered the East-West struggle in Asia and Eastern Europe. Mao’s victory in the Battle of the Huai-Hai marked the onset of an era in which East Asia would be engulfed in war, revolution, and genocide. Tens of millions would die in China, Korea, Indochina, and Indonesia in wars, political purges, and sectarian violence. The United States would suffer in the region its worst military and political defeats. And at the end of the era, with the collapse of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, China would reconstitute itself and be launched on the path toward becoming the leading power in East Asia. In the Epilogue of this journal I advance my thesis that the White House can derive lessons from the American reverses in China and the Indochina wars which would be of significant value in coping with other foreign conflicts such as those current in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During those decades of turmoil I worked as a correspondent in turn for the International News Service, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. I covered the turning points in the Chinese Civil War, the events leading to the Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and monumental ideological split with Nikita Khrushchev, the French Indochina War, America’s Vietnam War, and the genocides in Cambodia and Indonesia.
The first American correspondent to be stationed in French Indochina after World War II, I traveled with the Foreign Legion along the embattled China frontier and briefed John F. Kennedy in Saigon when he visited Vietnam as a young congressman in 1951. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, which divided Vietnam into the North and the South, I was thrust into the role of a participant, more than a reporter, in the negotiations between the major powers. Decades later, as a senior editor of the Times, I delved into the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s history of the Vietnam War, extracts of which the paper published, and found revealed there the top-secret political decision making which led to events that I had witnessed earlier on the ground.
From posts in Eastern Europe I reported on America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. Working for the Associated Press I covered the Soviet threats to divided, isolated West Berlin from 1956 to 1959. Based in Moscow for the Times from 1960 to 1963, I was in the Kremlin reception hall on the night when Nikita Khrushchev, vodka glass in hand, told those of us gathered about him that thermonuclear war in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis had been averted. I would spend an evening with Fidel Castro in November 1983 and talk with him about his ties to the Russians.
Transferred from Moscow to Hong Kong as chief Southeast Asia correspondent, I traveled to Indonesia, where I covered the dethroning of Indonesian president Sukarno after the 1965 leftist putsch that brought on the retaliatory purge coup by army generals in which an estimated 750,000 people died. Bill Moyers, press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, tells of the summer of 1966 when Johnson kept copies of my Indonesia dispatches about the army coup and the genocide that followed “in his pocket and on his desk so that he could show them to reporters and visiting firemen.” Johnson was contending then that his stand in Vietnam had emboldened the Indonesian generals to crush the Communist bid for domination of the archipelago.
I mark August 6, 1945, that day when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as the date of my entry into Asia. I was then an army infantry lieutenant aboard the troop transport Lydia Lykes, bound for Leyte in the Philippines, tagged to lead a platoon in the invasion of Japan. There were wild rousing cheers that day aboard the ship packed with infantrymen who hailed the atomic bombing as their escape from predictable deadly fire on the beaches of Japan. I was among the celebrants giving no thought to what devastation might have been wrought on the people of Hiroshima.
Forty-two years later, standing amid the ruins of Hiroshima, I recalled that celebration aboard the Lydia Lykes. The mayor of Hiroshima had invited chief editors of the leading newspapers of the nuclear powers—China’s People’s Daily, the Times of London, Le Monde of Paris, Pravda of Moscow, and the New York Times—to a memorial service for victims of the bomb. I was summoned from among the five thousand mourners in the Peace Memorial Park to walk side by side with Victor Afanasyev, the editor of Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, bearing bouquets of white chrysanthemums, to the Memorial Cenotaph, on which was chiseled the names of the dead and the inscription “Let all the souls here rest in peace; For we shall not repeat the evil.” Upwards of 200,000 had died from the bomb blast and its aftereffects. We bowed and deposited the flowers before a flickering flame. We were guided then to the Peace Memorial Museum, where we were shown images of the destruction wrought by the bomb and the mutilated dead. Asked by Japanese reporters of my impressions, I spoke of my shock and profound sympathy. I inquired then why there were no photographs of the carnage at Pearl Harbor or what was perpetrated by the Japanese military in China. As consequence of the Japanese invasion begun in 1931, some 15 million Chinese had died. There was only silence. Viewing the horrific photographs of the Hiroshima dead, I was impelled to ponder President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. It is said that the bomb spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, likely me among them, who would have died in an invasion of Japan. But yet I wondered then, and have never ceased wondering, whether such an invasion was inevitable and whether there was sufficient justification for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and later Nagasaki. What if, rather than dropping the bombs, there had been a delay while other attacks were pressed on Japan? The Japanese navy had been effectively destroyed by the American fleet in the engagement in the Gulf of Leyte. Would not the Japanese have surrendered soon enough as they continued to suffer firebombing and starvation by blockade? As humanity confronts the threat of nuclear proliferation among rogue nations and theft of bomb components by terrorists, questions persist for me about the wisdom of the decision to introduce nuclear weapons and wage atomic warfare.
These questions are implied in recent policy statements by some world leaders. Shortly after he assumed office in January 2009, President Barack Obama joined with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and British prime minister Gordon Brown in calling for the reinforcement of curbs on nuclear proliferation and reduction of arms in existing arsenals as steps toward the realization of a world free of nuclear weaponry. The American president said: “The goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.” His pronouncement was the first step toward reversing the policies that led to Hiroshima and the terrors of nuclear proliferation.
I had volunteered for duty in the Pacific, rather than Europe, for reasons frankly somewhat peripheral to devotion to patriotic duty. From high school days in New York when I read Edgar Snow’s epic Red Star over China, I had dreamed of becoming a correspondent in China. I chose, therefore, to study at the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri because the school had long-standing contacts with universities in China. It was my crash course at Missouri in the Japanese language and other Asian studies that persuaded the army assignment officer to ship me to the Pacific rather than the European battleground. I was pleased, since I had planned, if I survived the war, to make my way to a news reporting job in China. My duffel aboard the Lydia Lykes was stuffed with books about China.
On landing in Leyte’s steamy jungle-encased port of Tacloban, I joined an infantry battalion engaged in rounding up Japanese stragglers in the jungle. In the grand strategy, Leyte had been the stepping-stone to Luzon, the larger island of the Philippines, and ultimately Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff targeted the Philippines rather than Japanese-held Taiwan, the other possible choice, in deference to General Douglas MacArthur’s plea that we were indebted to the ever loyal Filipino people who had endured Japanese occupation. At 10:00 hours on October 20, 1944, Sixth Army forces landed on the east coast of Leyte, and at 13:30 General MacArthur waded ashore to broadcast his message: “People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the Grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil.” But MacArthur’s intelligence staff, headed by Colonel Charles Willoughby, had underestimated Japanese capabilities. The struggle lasted longer than he projected, and MacArthur was not able to declare the island won until December 31. In fact, the ferocious battle was not completely over until May 8, when the last major Japanese holdouts were crushed. I cite these miscalculations because in retrospect I found them prescient of subsequent intelligence failures by Willoughby in the Korean War when he underestimated the capabilities of the Chinese Communist troops much as he did the Japanese on Leyte.
On the island, my battalion guarded thousands of Japanese prisoners. During my inspections of the stockade in which generals were confined, I gained my first direct insight into the Japanese mind. When, I, a first lieutenant, entered their stockade, the generals would leap to attention and salute. Authority was paramount to them, as it was when they obeyed their blundering emperor.
After six months on Leyte, while on leave in Manila, I encountered Captain Ernie Ernst, a polo teammate at Missouri, at an American officers’ club. Inevitably, the reunion began with the recollection of a hilarious tale from the annals of Missouri’s polo teams. When I entered the university in 1939, I was required to enroll in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The ROTC unit at Missouri specialized in horse-drawn field artillery. My first day in the stables I attempted to mount a horse from the wrong side, evoking guffaws from the other students, many of them farm-born youths, at the spectacle of this New Yorker thrown by a startled steed. With that humiliation, I became obsessed with horses and spent countless hours training on the riding paths. In my junior year I made the polo squad to the astonishment of Ernst, who was the captain of the team. When I met him in Manila, Ernie was stationed at Camp John Hay near Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, as a public relations officer and liaison to the city government. He was homeward bound and proposed that I replace him. There followed transfer from the jungles of Leyte to the mountaintop camp near lovely Baguio.
Fortuitously, the new posting brought me in contact with Preston Grover, the Associated Press bureau chief in Manila, who listened sympathetically to my journalistic aspirations. He introduced me to Frank Robertson, an Australian correspondent who was the Asian bureau chief of the International News Service, a subsidiary of the Hearst Newspapers. At a bar, I told Robertson that I was due for terminal leave, that I had declined a regular army commission, and that I had enrolled in the College of Chinese Studies in Peking. (The city was customarily referred to by old China hands as “Peking,” the Western rendering of its historical imperial title. Nor did China hands bow to the decision of Chiang Kai-shek to bestow the name “Peip’ing,” meaning Northern Peace, in the 1930s when he moved the capital south to Nanking. It would later become in Pinyin romanization “Beijing,” meaning Northern Capital, under Mao Zedong.) Robertson grinned when I told him of my plan to study the Chinese language at the college while I freelanced as a journalist. After a short cease-fire, fighting between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong had reignited, and Robertson was looking for a stringer in Peking to cover the Civil War. He ordered another scotch and offered me the job. The title that would adorn my name card in English and Chinese would be “Chief Correspondent for North China and Manchuria.” The imposing title would compensate, I rationalized, for the meagerness of salary: fifty dollars a month plus payments for what was published. On a September morning in 1946 I boarded a U.S. Army transport plane bound for China. It was beyond my imagination that in a matter of weeks I would be flying from Peking to report from Mao Zedong’s headquarters in Yenan and that I would be covering the Chinese Civil War for the next three years. And during those years in China, I would meet and fall wildly in love with the beautiful Audrey Ronning, who would become my wife, the mother of our five daughters born in Saigon, London, Berlin, and New York, and my journalist partner in reporting assignments around the world.