Monthly Archives: May 2017
In September 1968, after spending a week sitting at the Foreign Desk near Sy Topping, meeting the various editors with whom I would be working, Top (that’s his nickname, and in 2017 he is still a very alive retiree) asked me to go back to Washington and help out in coverage there until I left for Moscow in February, 1969.. At that time the bureau was located in an office building on Connecticut Avenue, in the heart of the downtown…..
I can remember the event as if it happened yesterday. It was the evening of August 20, 1968. I was at the State Department covering a talk by Secretary of State Rusk on the Johnson Administration’s foreign policy in advance of the start of the Democratic Party convention which was to start on August 26 in Chicago. The department auditorium was filled with delegates to the convention and newsmen. Just as Rusk was about to start taking questions, his assistant Benjamin Read handed…..
The outbreak of what would become known as the Six Day War in June 1967 came as a surprise to many of us, so focused as we were at The Star on Vietnam at that time. It had long been a given that ever since the 1956 Middle East war in which President Eisenhower compelled the Israelis to withdraw from seized Egyptian territory, that U.N. peacekeepers were ensuring the borders and that there was little likelihood of an eruption of…..
By the end of August 1965, the Johnson administration was willing to try the United Nations in an effort to get something started in Vietnam. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, had dropped dead in the streets of London in July, and President Johnson had persuaded Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg to resign from the Court and replace Stevenson at the United Nations. Washington was stunned by the move—at least I was. I could not understand…..
When I first began writing my Week in Review column in 1961 for the Washington Star, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were all exotic Southeast Asian countries. They had all been under French control prior to World War Two and then subject to internal strife due to Communist efforts to take over the countries. A 1954 Geneva agreement divided Vietnam into a Communist North Vietnam and a South Vietnam initially dominated by a Catholic hierarchy headed by President Ngo Dinh Diem and…..
At about the same time that the Kennedy administration was expressing its pride in achieving the first Soviet-American arms deal, the situation in Southeast Asia was heating up. The most significant development occurred on November 1 and 2 when rebellious officers from the South Vietnamese army kidnapped and then murdered President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu Dinh Nhu, two Roman Catholics who were running South Vietnam—a nation of Buddhists—and who were quite controversial for their dictatorial policies. In fact,…..
There was a collective sigh of relief in the United States with the successful ending of the Cuban Missile crisis. And as we were about to learn as 1962 neared its end, it also had an impact on Premier Khrushchev’s thinking. As 1963 began, there was a clear sense of confidence in Washington that there was an upswing in world developments. In his State of the Union address, Kennedy, a lifelong sailor, drew upon seafaring language to suggest what might…..
President Kennedy was generally optimistic about the world’s trouble spots when 1962 began. In his State of the Union address to Congress, he said that regarding the “brave city of Berlin” the United States was “prepared to talk when appropriate and to fight if necessary.” But he hesitated to predict whether or not negotiations would be fruitful. And of course he could not have predicted that in 27 years time, the Berlin crisis would be solved once and for all…..