On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Topping, Seymour

  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 t
he 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.