On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  As the evening wore on, Audrey made another approach to Khrushchev. With her friend Lucy Jarvis, an NBC producer, at her side, she asked if they could do a documentary for NBC on the Kremlin. The Soviet leader, who seemed charmed by her, agreed. (The NBC documentary was produced the following year.) Nina Khrushchev, who was standing nearby, invited Audrey to tea and consented to her bringing a camera. The next afternoon, in a small reception room of the Kremlin, with a few wives of ambassadors and members of the Presidium in attendance, Audrey chatted with Nina over tea and cakes about children and life in Moscow. The Cuban missile crisis thus ended, at least for the Toppings, with a tea party. In the summer of 1963, after ten days of hard negotiations in Moscow with W. Averell Harriman, then undersecretary of state, Khrushchev signed a nuclear test-ban treaty, which prohibited testing in the atmosphere and outer space. The Berlin crisis as such vanished.

  At year’s end, Kennedy gave another sort of party at Miami’s Orange Bowl when he welcomed back the 1,113 survivors of the 1,300 exiles who landed on the shores of Cuba in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. The president ransomed them from Castro for $43 million worth of baby food and medical supplies.

  In September 2001, Audrey and I visited Khrushchev’s gravesite in the Novodevichy Cemetery, the most venerated cemetery in Moscow, where some of Russia’s most famous writers are buried. I was then the administrator of the Pulitzer prizes and had been invited to Moscow by Genrikh Borovik, a former Soviet diplomat, to advise on the creation of a similar competition making annual awards to Russian investigative reporters. The foundation sponsoring the awards was to be named in memory of his son, Artyom Borovik, a celebrated pioneer investigative reporter, a courageous critic of Kremlin policies, and the best-known historian of the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, which he had covered as a journalist. Artyom, who as a child had played with our children when his father was at the United Nations, was killed in a mysterious plane crash at the Moscow airport in March 2000. At Novodevichy, where he was buried, we attended—just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States—a memorial church service at which we held candles as the Russian Orthodox priest intoned prayers for Artyom and for the 9/11 victims. Audrey and I then went to Khrushchev’s burial plot. There was no one else there. It was a small plot headed by a black-and-white marble bust of Khrushchev which the sculptor Ernest Neizvestny said he had crafted in a style that would symbolize the ambiguity and contradictory nature of the Soviet leader’s rule.

  As for Castro, the Cuban leader emerged from resolution of the missile crisis enraged by what he denounced publicly as a deal negotiated behind his back. He rejected Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge as meaningless and criticized Khrushchev’s failure to demand American withdrawal from the base at Guantanamo and an end to the trade embargo imposed earlier by President Kennedy. However, I found him mollified by what amounted to a Soviet payoff in subsidies by Khrushchev’s successors when I spent an evening with him in his Havana office in November 1983. Let me, in the next chapter, vault ahead in time, to say what that engaging meeting was like.

  23

  AN EVENING WITH FIDEL CASTRO

  In November 1983, then as managing editor of the Times, I traveled through South America, visiting our bureaus, interviewing leaders of the strife-torn continent, and all the while hoping that Fidel Castro would agree to my repeated requests for a meeting. Since my days in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis I had hoped for an opportunity to interview Castro about the aftermath of the confrontation with President Kennedy and his relations with the Soviet Union. I was accompanied on my Latin America tour by Bill Kovach, the enterprise editor of our National Desk. The circumstances were rather odd, but our invitation to visit Cuba did finally come through during the evening of November 23 in Managua, Nicaragua.

  We had just interviewed Tomás Borge, a member of the ruling Directorate of the Sandinista Party, which was battling the American-supported Contra guerrillas. Borge had taken us to dinner in a shacklike house in a poor village on the outskirts of Managua, where we talked to the people and dined on pork, black beans, rice, and Coca Cola, and then back to the capital for drinks at a fancy bar at the Intercontinental Hotel. Suddenly, I was summoned from the bar at 10 o’clock to take a phone call from the Cuban ambassador. The next morning we were aboard a Cuban airliner bound for Havana. We lunched with Cuban officials in Havana at the Bodeguita del Medio, where there was a sign handwritten by Ernest Hemingway: “My Mogito in La Bodeguita, My Daiquiri in El Floridita.” It was a lovely lunch sampling the Hemingway drinks, but our hosts did not reveal whether Castro would be seeing us. Two days passed marked by interviews with Cuban leaders and tours. Then, at 9:30 P.M., a phone call in my hotel room: “We will pick you up in a moment; the president is ready to receive you.”

  We were welcomed at the Council of State building by Alfredo Ramírez, the head of the American Department in the Ministry of External Affairs. We surrendered our cameras and tape recorder at the door, as requested, and a few minutes later we were ushered into Castro’s spacious office, an oblong wood-paneled room. The president’s large wooden desk piled with working files stood in a far corner before an overfilled bookcase. Fidel Castro greeted us as we entered. He was dressed in his familiar uniform, green combat fatigues, a short combat jacket with leather belt, and black zipper boots. His beard was quite long and rather straggly, but his hair with its silver gray streaks was well groomed. Castro waved us to beige leather couches arranged around a coffee table. We were seated with his aides: Alfredo Ramírez, Ramón Sánchez-Paridi, head of the Interest Section in Washington, and José Migar Barrenco, the secretary of the Council of State.

  Castro, his manner warm and friendly, asked me to sit beside him, saying he would like to be able to look into my face. He apologized for inviting us to his office at such a late hour and added with a smile that possibly he had upset our plans; perhaps we would have preferred to go to the Tropicana, a large, splashy nightclub cabaret. Castro then invited questions, noting that he preferred to have our conversation kept out of the newspapers but that I was free to convey his views to associates. I am recording here condensed excerpts of Castro’s remarks for the first time.

  I began by asking Castro for his view of the tensions between President Ronald Reagan’s administration and the Soviet leadership and their impact on Latin America, especially Cuba. Castro said that tensions were probably more severe than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. He said the international situation had been aggravated in particular by the decision of the United States and its allies to deploy Pershing missiles in Western Europe. You can judge the reaction of the Soviet Union to the deployment of the Pershings, he said, by comparing it to the American reaction during the 1962 crisis when the Russians were implanting forty-two medium-range missiles on Cuban soil. The American reaction was violent. There developed the threat of war. Now, Castro said, there is a parallel. If Russian missile launchers had been implanted in Cuba, they could have hit American targets in only a few minutes. The Pershing missiles can reach targets in the Soviet Union in a few minutes. So there is reason for the Russians to be concerned—in fact, even more so, since the Pershings are fifty times greater in power and numbers. (The Pershing systems were scrapped following the ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on May 27, 1988.)

  Then, striking a characteristic pose, Castro stroked his beard, thought for a moment, and, gesturing with his forefinger, said: “However, you must understand that the struggle in Latin America began much before there was any East-West confrontation or, in fact, even before the Bolshevik Revolution.” He said that the struggle for independence and freedom in Latin America would continue even if there was a détente between the Soviet Union and the United States. Even under conditions of détente, he thought it probable that the United States would still resist the revolutionary struggle convulsing Latin America. With a shrug, he said there was a possibility that détente might even work to the disadvantage of Latin America.
<
br />   I asked whether it was unrealistic for Cuba to adopt an attitude of hostility while living in the shadow of the United States. Castro retorted it was not Cuba which had taken a stance of hostility but actually it was the United States which had been hostile toward Cuba. He said that countries struggling for their independence could not give up simply because they were living in the proximity of the United States. He said the revolutionary struggle was spreading throughout Latin America and he foresaw a day when even countries like Brazil would join and the United States would have to respect the power of the Latin American nations. Despite all of this, Castro continued, it was certainly possible for the United States to come to an accommodation with Cuba and bring about flourishing economic relations. He asked me: “You have diplomatic relations with China, which is a Communist country, why not with us?” I pointed out that good relations had developed between China and the United States for at least two reasons: China had become independent of Moscow and the United States thus no longer felt menaced by a Sino-Soviet monolith. Secondly, the Chinese had given up attempting to export revolution to the less developed countries.

  Castro replied: As far as the export of revolution is concerned, it was true that Cuba has assisted revolutionaries in various countries, although the extent has been exaggerated. He said it did not make any difference, in any case, how much assistance you give to revolutionaries engaged in struggle unless there is a real will to win and a need to bring about change in the country. Those are the crucial and decisive factors, he said. He cited the American programs of assistance to the Salvadoran Army and before that to the South Vietnamese army. They failed, he said, because the revolutionaries had the spirit and will to win and had roots among the people and in the country.

  As regards Cuba’s relations with the Soviet Union, Castro said, it was on a mutual basis and at times it was the Cubans who took the lead in urging Moscow to adopt policies. He said he remained grateful to Moscow for its large-scale assistance dating from the Khrushchev era. He did not complain about his treatment in the resolution of the missile crisis. Castro recalled that when he first took power, he was isolated, under pressure from the United States, and didn’t know in which direction to turn. He said it was the Soviet Union which came forward with the assistance he needed to build and preserve the Cuban nation—and the Cubans cannot overlook that fact. However, he stressed that Cuba retained its independence of action and that Soviet military advisers were in Cuba solely to train his army in the use of new weapons. The Soviet military force was a remnant of what Nikita Khrushchev posted on the island prior to the 1962 missile crisis with the United States. At the time I spoke with Castro, he was receiving a Soviet subsidy of $4 billion annually, representing 25 percent of the small country’s GNP. This included Soviet purchases of sugar and nickel at prices above market level. The subsidies ended in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union.

  In replying to questions, Castro stared intently into my eyes and often raised his hands in expressive gestures. Castro’s personal interpreter was brought in after the first interpreter was worn out; she not only translated simultaneously but also mimicked Castro’s inflections and expressions. Castro’s remarks revealed a broad knowledge of foreign affairs and history, including that of the United States. He frequently cited names of relevant personalities, dates, and statistics. Speaking of the work of the thousands of Cuban teachers in Nicaragua, he said proudly that 93 percent of their pupils had advanced to the next grade. When two Cuban schoolteachers were killed by the Contras near the Honduran border, he said, twenty-nine thousand Cuban schoolteachers volunteered thereafter to go to Nicaragua. As he spoke tenderly about Nicaragua’s schoolchildren, I thought, what a contrast. This is the same man whose dictatorial Communist regime had so brutally repressed political opponents.

  At midnight, after the conversation with Castro had continued for more than two hours, ranging largely over issues relating to the civil wars in Salvador and Nicaragua, I was thanking Castro when he interrupted to say: “Well, it’s not too late to go to the Tropicana.” A tray of mogitas and daiquiris was brought in. For himself, Castro poured two drinks of Chivas Regal, saying he preferred scotch to rum. During our meeting, Castro smoked only one small cigar. He told us he had read everything that Hemingway wrote. In particular, he admired The Old Man and the Sea because Hemingway had written a novel “simply about a man and his thoughts.”

  24

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY

  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 newspap
er 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.