Monthly Archives: October 2017
Even before the break-up of the Soviet bloc in late 1989, events in China were producing a major story, As many as 100,000 students had made their way to Beijing and had taken over control of Tiananmen square, the center of the capital. The student excitement was fanned by the arrival of Gorbachev in May, seeking to patch up Soviet-Chinese relations which had been strained to the breaking point for some thirty years, ever since Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin policies. The students…..
At the beginning of August in 1989, I officially became foreign editor. I asked Mike Kaufman, who had recently been the Times’ correspondent in Warsaw, to be my deputy. I was surprised at how little news there seemed to be at that particular time, and I sent a memo out to all correspondents, telling them that we were desperate to receive copy since I could guarantee that their stories would get in the paper right away and would not be…..