On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Descending into the street and working alone—her Chinese guides too frightened to accompany her—Audrey photographed the turbulence. When a group of Red Guards encircled her and tried to seize her cameras, she fled to the protection of the nearby International Club, where fortunately a friend, Colonel Jacques Guillermaz, the French military attaché, who was watching the demonstrations from the front of the building, was able to shield her. Observing the processions, Audrey did not know, or for that matter neither did the young marchers know precisely, what Mao had set in motion. But within a few days, the government began canceling the visas of tourists, businessmen, and other foreign visitors. Audrey made it back to Hong Kong with her film and notes, which became a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Almost at once, the gates to the country were slammed shut as officials braced to cope with an internal upheaval.

  Mao reappeared in Peking on July 18 as the capital gradually was coming under Maoist control. The Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee was summoned into session on August 1 to give formal approval to the Cultural Revolution as units of the People’s Liberation Army were ordered by Mao to move into strategic positions around the city. Returning to Peking, Liu attended the closed Plenum, where he was criticized and soon found himself isolated. In early August, Mao was still confronted by party and government cadres in the provinces who were resistant to his radical ideology and loyal to Liu and Deng Xiaoping. To cope with them, the Maoists put into play their most potent weapon, the figure of Mao as the “father” of the Revolution. In their struggle with the Maoists, the pragmatists had been caught up in a contradiction that was to bring about their downfall. Their infighting with the Maoists had not detracted from their continuing surface adulation of Mao. The Mao cult had become so much a part of the Communist mystique that even his critics felt compelled to continue outwardly to render obeisance to the Chairman. At the 1959 Mount Lu Central Committee meeting, when an official declaration critical of his Leap policy was contemplated, Mao threatened to go to the countryside and rally the peasantry in support of his polices by launching civil war. The Central Committee backed off, as was indicated by the absence of any official rejection of Mao’s policies. His public image of infallibility remained unblemished. Unaware of the inner-party dispute, the bulk of the population, especially the youth who had been thoroughly indoctrinated in schools, held to an unflagging worshipful attitude toward Mao. Exploiting his patriarchal role, Mao turned to the youth to carry the Cultural Revolution to the provinces. On August 5, he wrote his own “Big Character” wall poster, “Bombard the Headquarters,” a call for militant action by young “shock forces” against his enemies. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the Mao wall posters were placarded all over the country. The “shock forces” mobilized around the country responded by marching in demonstrations denouncing the bourgeois “monsters and ghosts” who had supposedly infiltrated into important party and government posts as well as the schools and were betraying the great leader’s ideology.

  On August 18, at a rally of nearly 1 million students in Peking’s Tiananmen Square, Mao accepted the red armband of a middle school group associated with Peking’s Tsinghua University, on which was emblazed “Hongweibing” (Red Guard) in gold characters. It was a militant group which had denounced and humiliated members of the eminent Tsinghua faculty who had been branded as too moderate in their revolutionary outlook or influenced by Chinese classical thought or foreign ideas. Thus, Mao designated the name and shaped the tactics of the diverse youth groups being formed in middle or secondary schools and colleges all over the country.

  On the rostrum in Tiananmen Square a strange and tragic game was played out on the day of the mass rally. Liu Shaoqi, although he had been berated at the Central Committee Plenum, was permitted to stand on the platform even as Lin Biao, freshly anointed by Mao as his new “closest comrade-in-arms” and heir apparent, was invited to address the massed students. Unleashing what was to become the most shocking and destructive phase of the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao called upon the youth to sweep away the “Four Olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits, which did not conform to socialist society.

  Within a matter of days after Lin Biao issued his call, squads of Red Guards roamed China’s cities destroying what they thought were vestiges of the old culture that were bourgeois or foreign. In Guangzhou, the privately owned little shops and stands were closed and denounced as anti-socialist. Buddhist temples and Christian churches were closed and defaced. Pre-Revolution historical monuments were smashed. The homes of “Black Elements”—former landlords, accused counterrevolutionaries, or bourgeois families—were sacked, their antiques destroyed. On the streets, visiting Overseas Chinese were stripped of foreign-made clothing and humiliated. On college campuses faculty members were paraded with dunce caps, women with long hair were shaved, and the apartments of elderly couples were broken into, their precious antiques hauled into the streets and destroyed.

  For the next two years, China was tortured by this uncontrolled paroxysm, an admixture of ideological fever and factional struggles for power, subsiding and then raging anew. Millions of Red Guards marched through Peking hailing Mao and embarked on rampaging tours of the country. By early 1967, they had paralyzed party and government offices. The army was compelled to take over administration of the provinces and protection of factories and utilities. Amid the chaos, rival coalitions of Red Guards, party cadres, and workers—all waving the red Maoist flag and Mao’s “Little Red Book” of sayings—became locked in mortal combat.

  Guangzhou, in keeping with its tradition of being at the center of revolution, was the scene of one of the worst of the collisions among Maoist factions. In early 1967, the East Wind and the more radical Red Flag groups fought pitched battles. In the fighting with iron bars and arms looted from army arsenals, thousands were wounded and killed. City services were disrupted, and crime was rampant. Encouraged by leftists in Peking, the Red Flag faction raided installations of the Guangzhou military garrison for arms. In Chongqing the contending factions employed machine guns and flamethrowers purloined from the city’s arms factories. The casualties mounted into the thousands. In August, as clashes between the radicals and the army multiplied throughout the country, Mao toured five affected provinces and authorized military clampdowns. Gradually order was restored, although sporadic outbreaks continued into 1968.

  During this madness, and when I returned to China in 1971 and again in 1980, I pieced together in interviews with Chinese officials the details of what had happened during the Cultural Revolution to Liu Shaoqi and other major figures whom I had come to know during the Yenan period. Liu disappeared from public view after his appearance on the rostrum in Tiananmen Square on August 18, 1966. Soon after, he and his wife, Wang Guangmei, were placed under house arrest in Peking. Liu Tao, their eldest daughter, denounced them in a “self-examination” article that was published in the December 1966 issue of a Red Guard organ at Peking’s Tsinghua University. It was not unusual during the Cultural Revolution for children to denounce parents who were deemed guilty of what Lin Biao termed “old” thinking. Liu Tao accused her mother of acting like a “queen” and said her father had given her “sinister instructions” on many occasions during 1965. “I am of the opinion that my father is really the number one power-holder taking the capitalist road within the party,” she wrote.

  For more than 20 years he has all the time opposed and resisted Chairman Mao and Mao Zedong Thought, carrying out, not socialism, but capitalism, and taking not the socialist road, but the capitalist road. In the current Cultural Revolution movement, he suppresses the revolutionary movements, enforces bourgeois dictatorship, brings white terror into play, and adopts the attitude of disregarding Chairman Mao. Really this simply cannot be tolerated, as Vice-Chairman Lin Biao has said. He never trusts the masses, but fears them and their movements to such an extent that he resorts to the suppression of the masses and their movement. Liu Shaoqi is actually the hangman resp
onsible for the suppression of this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and if his road is followed, China will necessarily change color.

  While under house arrest, Liu and his wife, Wang Guangmei, were paraded, cross-examined, and humiliated at Red Guard demonstrations. At one mass meeting, Wang, a highly cultured woman, was jostled about draped with a necklace of ping-pong balls symbolizing the pearls she had worn during the state visit with her husband to Indonesia before the Maoist denunciation of them.

  At the Central Committee Plenum of October 1968, Liu and Deng Xiao-ping were branded “Capitalist-roaders Number One and Two” and formally ousted from all their party and government positions. Denounced at the Plenum as a “traitor, renegade and scab,” Liu was exiled to Kaifeng, Henan Province, in Central China, where he died in 1969 in an isolated cell, denied the medical care he needed for treatment of pneumonia and diabetes. Deng Xiaoping was banished by Mao to Jiangxi Province, where he was to spend three and a half years as a factory worker. In the next years, Deng would be restored as vice premier with the aid of Zhou Enlai only to be denounced once again by the Maoists in 1976 after the death of the premier. But shortly thereafter, with the demise of the “Gang of Four,” he would regain power as the paramount leader of China, and he would then exact vengeance for what was perpetrated against him and his comrades.

  32

  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 dispa
tches of the Vietnam War.