On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  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.

  33

  THE PENTAGON PAPERS

  Early in March 1971, unexpectedly and under the most extraordinary circumstances, we became privy at the Times to the secret history of the conduct of the Vietnam War by the administrations of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. The history, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, contained such stunning revelations as the fact that President Johnson went ahead with the expansion of the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 despite the judgment of the government’s intelligence community that it would not, as he intended, impel Hanoi to cease its support of the Vietcong insurgency in the South. Contained also was the estimate made a few months later that the bombing was militarily ineffective. The Pentagon Papers came into our possession through the ingenuity of Neil Sheehan, an investigative reporter in our Washington Bureau. They were made available to him secretly by Daniel Ellsberg, a political analyst employed by the Rand Corporation, a research firm which did work for the government on sensitive projects.

  The Papers comprised a forty-seven-volume history of the United States’ involvement in Indochina and Southeast Asia generally from World War II to May 1968, when peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese opened in Paris and President Johnson announced his intention not to seek another term as president. The study had been commissioned by Robert McNamara in June 1967 when he was secretary of defense, on the assumption that its findings would provide useful guidelines for future policy making. The project, designated the Vietnam Study Task Force, employing thirty-six historians and analysts, was headed by Leslie Gelb, a former Senate aide who later left government service to become a Washington reporter at the Times, then a columnist, and eventually president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ellsberg, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, had been employed by Gelb as one of his analysts and had been given access to two copies of the existing fifteen which were held in the Rand office in Santa Monica, California. A former marine officer and once employed in Vietnam by the Defense Department, Ellsberg had been a hawkish supporter of the war. But then observing the evolution of the war in Vietnam and Cambodia and reading through the Pentagon Papers, he had become disaffected and committed to doing what he could to bring the wars to an end. In making contact with Sheehan, whom he had met in Vietnam, Ellsberg was seeking means of making public forty-three volumes of the Pentagon Papers, although they were still classified “‘top secret,” hoping that the disclosures would spur the Congress and the public to resolve the Vietnam War. He was withholding four volumes which related to the peace talks in Paris so as not to prejudice the negotiations. Ellsberg copied the Papers with Anthony J, Russo, a close friend, who was also employed at the Rand site and, like Ellsberg, passionately committed to seeking an end to the Vietnam War. Prior to contacting Sheehan, Ellsberg had attempted unsuccessfully to interest members of Congress, including Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator George McGovern. He found them unwilling to handle the files because of their highly classified nature. He had been warned by lawyers that leaking the classified Papers might land him in jail.

  The Papers revealed details of how the Truman administration had aided the French in perpetuating their colonial controls while ignoring Ho Chi Minh’s repeated appeals for cooperation in realizing the independence of Vietnam, the origins of the gradual descent by the United States militarily into the Indochina quagmire, and accounts of how covert sabotage operations had been carried out against North Vietnam by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Most significantly they documented how the Congress and the public had been deceived through the withholding or distortion of information about the conduct of the war.

  Neil Sheehan brought us, without revealing his source, photocopied dupes of what Ellsberg had carried piecemeal in his briefcase over months out of the Rand offices. Over a weekend at an apartment in Boston where he had stored the Papers Ellsberg permitted Sheehan to read the documents with the understanding that he would only make notes. He was not yet prepared to turn over the documents because Sheehan could not give him assurance that the Times would publish the Papers in considerable detail prior to their inspection by senior editors. Aware that some of the documents were already circulating in some circles, and determined not to be beaten out on the story, Sheehan ignored Ellsberg’s stipulation and went in search of a copying machine. Alerted earlier by Sheehan to his possession of the Papers, we wired him the $1,500 needed to keep a copy shop open all weekend to duplicate them. Sheehan and his wife, Susan, then drove with the Papers piled in their car to Washington. From New York, we dispatched Gerald Gold, one of our most skilled copy editors, to Washington to join Sheehan in delving through 3,000 pages in narrative of studies made by Gelb’s group and 4,000 pages of appended documents. Sheehan, Gold, and Max Frankel, the Washington bureau chief, then brought the Papers, with their notes, to New York to be scrutinized by A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor, myself, and the foreign editor, James L. Greenfield.

  Greenfield, a former assistant secretary of state for public affairs under Dean Rusk, with experience in processing government documents, was put in charge of the team preparing the Papers for publication, which was designated in-house the Vietnam Archive. Writers, editors, and researchers were assigned to work with Greenfield under the most secure arrangements. Our first task was to establish the authenticity of the documents, although we had the fullest confidence in Sheehan’s reliability as an investigative reporter. I knew Sheehan well personally, and his wife, Susan, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, first having met Neil in Saigon in 1963 when he was working as a reporter for the United Press. Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the son of a dairy farmer, a cum laude graduate of Harvard, he was then twenty-seven years old, a tireless and dedicated reporter. Impressed with his talents, energy, and courage in covering Vietnam, I was instrumental in bringing him to the Times in 1964.

  Greenfield soon told Rosenthal and me that checking discreetly with authoritative sources and studying the documents had convinced him of their authenticity. Internal transmission markings on the documents were scrubbed out to ensure that, if stolen, they not be used by hostile agents to break the codes. The “top secret” stamps had been removed earlier, presumably by Ellsberg. The operation then went into high gear, competitively spurred by information that some of the material had been seen by others, specifically a group which intended to publish some of the material in book form. We also learned that the Washington Post was tracking the Papers.

  It was apparent that many weeks would be required to select and correlate contents of the documents so they could be published coherently. On April 22, the operation was expanded with additional staffers and moved into two suites in the New York Hilton, with guards posted at the doors to maintain security. The writers in addition to Sheehan were Fox Butterfield, E. W. Kenworthy, and Hedrick Smith. The editors included Gold, Allan Siegal, a
nd Samuel Abt.

  On April 29, Rosenthal, Greenfield, and I were called by Harding F. Bancroft, a lawyer, who was an executive vice president of the paper, to a meeting in the boardroom of the Times on the fourteenth floor, where Arthur O. Sulzberger, the publisher, and other executives had their offices. James Reston came up from Washington for the meeting. The subject was the Pentagon Papers. When Rosenthal and I entered the boardroom, we were disturbed by the number of people present, knowing that the more people aware of our possession of the Papers, the greater the chance of a leak. If the government learned of our project, it might move to seize the Papers or halt publication through a court injunction.

  We were surprised to see Louis M. Loeb, a partner of Lord, Day & Lord, corporate counsel to the Times for twenty-three years, and two of his legal associates. Others present were Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher, Ivan Veit, another executive vice president who supervised our book-publishing enterprise, James C. Goodale, the general counsel of the paper, and Sydney Gruson, then assistant to the publisher.

  As the News Department did on all stories that might bring legal repercussions, Rosenthal had informed Goodale about our plans to publish the Papers. Goodale, as was the normal practice in cases where court litigation was a possibility, had consulted with Lord, Day & Lord. With the publisher at the head of the table, the editors, Reston, Rosenthal, Greenfield, and I, sat facing the lawyers. It was the obligation of Loeb and his associates to point out possible legal pitfalls, and they did so scrupulously and emphatically. But it seemed to us, the editors, they did so without sensitivity to the broader questions of the public interest and the journalistic responsibilities of the Times. The lawyers read extracts from the federal secrecy codes pertinent to the dissemination of classified information which stipulated penalties for violations of up to imprisonment for ten years—whereupon Reston remarked wryly, with the concurrence of all the editors, that he would be delighted to go to jail on this one. If the Times did not publish, he said he would be glad to do so in the Vineyard Gazette, a weekly newspaper he owned on Martha’s Vineyard, a resort island off the Massachusetts coast. The editors contended that the secrecy codes were not applicable since the documents were historical in nature, did not affect the national defense, and the press had repeatedly published, without penalty, classified material of a similar nature in the public interest. Max Frankel would later submit from Washington a detailed affidavit documenting that this was the case. I also advanced my contention that the publication of the Papers was vital to the national debate that was in progress on a question that transcended the Vietnam War. What was revealed in the Papers would help the Congress and the public determine whether new safeguards were needed against secret arbitrary action by the Executive Branch.

  The meeting ended with the publisher ruling that we would go forward with the preparation of the Papers for publication, but he withheld his final decision as to whether to publish pending a final exhaustive review of all the factors involved. It was plain watching the forty-five-year-old publisher at the table as he looked side to side that the burden of making a ruling was weighing extremely heavily on him. It was falling to him to decide what ultimately was in the public interest, evaluate the warnings of his legal consultants that the Times and its executives might face criminal prosecution, and gauge how the reputation of the paper would be affected. The project would cost, at a time of economic recession, millions of dollars in staff commitments, many additional pages of newsprint for the Papers, and large legal fees when the controversy inevitably would go into the courts.

  For these reasons, Rosenthal and I were deeply troubled as we left the boardroom and walked down the corridor to the elevators. “Our jobs may also be on the line here,” I said. Abe looked at me, his brow creased, and he nodded. We knew that if the Times did not publish the Papers, our positions at the paper might become untenable. Apart from the obligation to our readers, it was dubious that we could retain the loyalty and respect of the staff if we failed to print the Papers. In keeping with the tradition of the paper and his family, the publisher, known to all as Punch, had always stood by the editors, regardless of risk or cost. I believed, as did Rosenthal, that he would do so again. But there was no certainty.

  In early May, as I was working with our writers and editors preparing for publication a series of summary articles based on the revelations in the Pentagon Papers, I was abruptly diverted. A cable arrived from Audrey: “Zhou Enlai says you can come to China.” Audrey had been traveling in China for seventeen days with her father, Chester Ronning, her sister, Sylvia, and a Canadian television team. They were doing a documentary on Ronning’s return to his birthplace, Fancheng, Hubei Province, three hundred miles up the Han River from Hankou. Ronning grew up in the town where his Lutheran missionary parents had founded a church and established the first middle school in China for both boys and girls. Audrey’s grandmother, Hannah Ronning, a tall, slim woman with piercing blue eyes and long chestnut hair drawn into a bun, mother of seven children, had been a spirited, dedicated missionary. When she died at the age of thirty-six, both Christian and non-Christian Chinese thronged to her funeral, remembering her as a teacher and the woman who had tended many infant girls abandoned on village byways. The documentary television crew had filmed the Ronnings at her graveside in the church courtyard and also scenes of Chester chatting with his Chinese boyhood friends. When Audrey’s grandfather, Halvor, opened the middle school in 1894, only one youngster turned up on the first day. When Audrey visited the school for a second time in 2008, she was cheered in the school yard by four thousand students waving welcoming banners.

  On May Day, before they left for Fancheng, Zhou Enlai had welcomed Ronning and Audrey to the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square in Peking. The premier received Ronning at a private side entrance. Welcoming him as “my old friend” and grasping his hand, he said: “I never shall forget what you did for me at the Geneva Conference [1954].” In the Jiangsu Room, one of the twenty-eight reception rooms of the Great Hall, Zhou offered tea and Central Flowery Kingdom cigarettes to his guests and laughingly chided Ronning for retiring from the Canadian diplomatic service. When Ronning protested that he had retired at seventy-one, although the compulsory age was sixty-five, the seventy-three-year-old premier quipped: “Well, you and I are exceptions to the rule. Take me now? Why should I retire?” A set of Audrey’s photographs of Zhou Enlai as he conversed with Ronning were published on the front page of the Times. One of them, published as the cover of Life magazine in connection with an article by Edgar Snow, was subsequently issued by the Chinese government as an official photo.

  When the Ronning party returned from their visit to Fancheng, Zhou gave a banquet in the Great Hall for Ronning. The ambassador used the occasion to ask whether visas could be granted to James Reston and me. I had asked Ronning if he would put forward both names, giving the Chinese the option of granting admission to a prestigious columnist or myself, well known to them from Civil War days, who could serve both as a reporter and as an executive who could negotiate the opening of a news bureau in Peking. The premier said he would assent to both visa applications and told Audrey she could message the news to me.

  On May 13, I was seated on the speaker’s platform in the Windsor Ballroom of the Commodore Hotel, having been corralled into lecturing about China to the New York Rotary Club. Still waiting impatiently to receive my visa, I was brooding: Shall I delight them with tales of my wife’s adventures in China, or should I read from my yellowed clippings of two decades ago? Suddenly I was summoned from the platform to take a telephone message. I was to call the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa. Visas had been approved for Reston and me. I flew to Ottawa that night. When Yao Yanliu, the embassy cultural attaché, handed me my visa the next morning, I asked if I could cross into China from Hong Kong on May 20 and join Audrey on the following day, her birthday. Yao left the timing in doubt. Back in New York, I went at once to see Rosenthal in his office. In his warm, effusive manner, Abe was enthu
siastic about my return to China. It was an important reporting opportunity, since the Times had no correspondent in China. He knew how eager I was, having broken the story in 1966 in the Times of the onset of the Cultural Revolution, to cover the next phase of the vast upheaval. He also knew how I yearned to join Audrey in touring the land where we met and were engaged. But both of us were troubled about the timing of my departure just as we were completing preparation for publication of the Pentagon Papers. At the Hilton hotel, our reporters and editors were tirelessly studying the Papers, gripped by mounting excitement as they delved into the startling revelations, and had begun readying analytical articles for publication. The target date for publication of the first article was June 14. Yet there many imponderables: Sulzberger had yet to give us license to publish. Would the courts uphold our First Amendment rights to publish if the Nixon administration moved to block publication on security grounds? And what would be the reaction to the articles by the public, which was already locked in debate about how the country should cope with the Vietnam morass? We felt that the public had a right to know the contents of the Papers, but we were not bent on publishing with the intent of galvanizing the antiwar movement. In fact, Rosenthal was personally supportive of the war, although he never allowed his sentiments to influence our news coverage. When Sheehan and I were reminiscing years later about those weeks of agonizing uncertainty, he told me that he remembered most vividly the day Rosenthal appeared unexpectedly in their hotel work suite. Assembling the writers and editors, he told them to have faith that, despite the warnings of lawyers and the hesitations of business executives wary of the risks and costs, the Papers would be published. “He inspired us,” Sheehan said. In truth, Rosenthal was not certain then that the management of the paper would accede to our plan. In the next days, as a caution he began reviewing his personal financial affairs to determine how he might support his family if he felt compelled to leave the paper.