Unleashed Voices: The Story of a Miraculous Vase / Episode #1
From Paris to Beijing, Hong Kong to Saigon and beyond, a vase that served as a centerpiece of art and diplomacy, journalism, and especially an opportunity lost in Vietnam.
This is the first of an occasional new series for Andelman Unleashed showcasing remarkable voices with compelling stories—past, present and future. Today our voice is that of Audrey Topping, a remarkable photographer, journalist and chronicler with a pedigree nonpareil …widow of the late Seymour Topping, daughter of the first Canadian ambassador to Mao Zedong's China. The Toppings traveled the world, chronicling ends of some eras, beginnings of others.
This is the first of two parts of just one of her compelling recollections….and comes at a momentous moment. Friday, February 3 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam” that brought an official end to the Vietnam War, or at least America’s direct involvement.
By Audrey Ronning Topping
This is the story of a mysterious glass vase that has travelled widely and witnessed world shaking events from Paris to Indochina, Vietnam, Canada, and New York over three-quarters of a century—and its extraordinary owners.
The vase began its journey in Paris where it was created by Émile Gallé, a renowned French artist of the late 19th century and a leading light of France's Art Nouveau movement.
Today, his work stands in a place of honor before a window in my living room in Connecticut. In the direct sunlight, the vase morphs into a burst of glory radiating peace, tranquility, and wonderful memories.
My connection to the vase began in June 1966 when my father arrived without warning, at the door of our home in Hong Kong. He was on his way to Hanoi. I didn’t know it then, but he was a secret agent—traveling incognito on his way to meet Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. The Canadian Government, in collaboration with Washington, had appointed him to travel to Hanoi on a secret mission called “Small Bridge,” to offer Canada’s “good offices” to negotiate peace talks between Washington and Hanoi.
I was concerned because my 71-year-old father had been assigned to cross a “A Red Line In the Sand” into enemy territory. The United States and North Vietnam were in the midst of a brutal war.
To complicate matters, my husband, Seymour Topping (“Top”) was in South Vietnam reporting the conflict for The New York Times. This was not the first war in Vietnam that he had covered. He had also reported on the French Indochina War in the 1950s.
The US-Vietnam War, which began in the 1960s, was a continuation of a war that had begun a century earlier with France. Let me briefly simplify the history.
A country in Southeast Asia called Indochina which included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos had been occupied and ruled by China for a thousand years before France drove out the Chinese in the 1830s and forcibly established a colonial empire known as French Indochina. France ruled these colonies until they were forcible taken by the Japanese in a coup d’état known as Meigo Sakusen (Operation Bright Moon) on March 9, 1945, close to the end of World War ll. When Japan was defeated in 1945, France attempted to reassert control of their colony. But the Vietminh in North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, chose to fight for independence.
In January 1950, Top and I came unknowingly into the story of the Yellow Vase only because we landed in the same place—Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City and then the capital of South Vietnam. We had no idea that the mysterious vase was in North Vietnam waiting for my father to discover it. Top and I had recently been married in Canada and were honeymooning in Hong Kong when Top was assigned by the Associated Press to go to Saigon, set up the first AP office in Indochina, and cover the French Indochina War.
Our first daughter was born in a French Military Hospital in Saigon on October 20, 1950. Susan was a year old when Senator John F. Kennedy, then a young congressman traveling with his brother Robert, arrived in Saigon in October 1951 for a ten day visit to acquaint himself with the situation in Indochina. Jack Kennedy crossed the tarmac to where reporters were standing and asked for Topping. He had heard that Top was the first American correspondent to be stationed in Saigon.
"I would like to have a talk with you,” Kennedy said to Top.
"All right," Top replied, "I’ll come to see you."
"No," Kennedy said. “I'll come to see you."
The next afternoon there was a knock on the door of our two-room apartment on Boulevard Charnier. Kennedy was alone. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said as I led him past our dinning room table into our lounge. He chose an easy chair near the bamboo bar. The Senator proceeded to ask Topping questions about every aspect of the war. Chiefly, should America get involved in helping France retain its Asian Empire? After listening to Top’s pessimistic view on French prospects and finding that both Top and I felt the United States should avoid at all costs any participation in a war with North Vietnam. Kennedy remarked: “I am going to talk about this when I get home. But it will give me trouble with some of my constituents.”
Then Kennedy asked to see the baby. When I carried out Susan he cooed and told me I looked like a Madonna in a Botticelli painting. Over drinks we had chatted for more than two hours until the driver of the embassy car, waiting for him in front of the café on the ground floor where the Foreign Legionnaires hung out, honked the horn impatiently.
In 1954, Ho’s Vietminh forces defeated the French colonialists at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and France lost control of its Asian empire. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were left to establish their own governments. The USSR and China supported the communist North with its capital in Hanoi while the United States and France supported the South, with its capital in Saigon. Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem restored the monarch, Emperor Bao Dai, to his throne. But the two refused to hold elections as prescribed by the International Control Commission (ICC) in the Geneva agreement that had ended the conflict. The ICC then drew a Red Line along the 17th parallel which became the front line of the Cold War in Asia. The North and South became locked in an armed struggle for dominance of the entire Vietnamese territory.
Ho Chi Minh kept fighting for an independence for his people that he had been seeking since 1919 when he first approached—with no success—Woodrow Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference that brought World War One to a close.
Ho regarded the conflict as a civil war, while American leaders based the struggle on, what many believed to be a false premise, dubbed “The Domino Theory,” advocating that if the Communist Vietminh won the war the rest of Southeast Asia would tumble like a row of dominoes.
Following a controversial incident in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4, 1964, Congress gave President Johnson the authority to engage in a direct war. He ordered the bombing of the North and increased the US military presence in South Vietnam. The war would last almost 20 years, from November 1, 1955, to April 30, 1975.
By 1966, President Lyndon Johnson became frustrated by the unwinnable battle and invited other countries to offer assistance in establishing peace. Canada had previously refused to send troops to Vietnam, and American draft dodgers were seeking asylum in Canada. Canada’s Prime Minister Lester Pearson called for a halt to the American bombing of North Vietnam. Pearson’s suggestion infuriated President Johnson. He summoned Pearson to Camp David for lunch and proceeded to cuss him out in the extremely foul language for which he was famous. He accused Canada’s Prime Minister of entering his home and “pissing on my rug.”
Paul Martin, Minister of External Affairs, and Prime Minister Pearson began searching for a Canadian initiative to bring North Vietnam and USA to the peace table. They decided to enlist my father. Chester Ronning was Canada’s recently retired Ambassador at Large who had served as Ambassador in Norway as well as China and as Canada’s High Commissioner to India. Ronning was well acquainted with Ho Chi Minh, India’s Nehru, and China’s Zhou Enlai, and understood the background of the crises in Indochina.
They felt he was the ideal candidate. Ambassador Ronning, aged 71, vigorous and active, was summoned from his home in Camrose, Alberta. Ronning accepted the assignment, code-named “Smallbridge.” The project called on him to explore what was needed to bring the USA and North Vietnam to the peace table and stop the war.
Chester later wrote: “At the initial briefing Canada’s Under Secretary of External Affairs gave me instructions on what I should say. I sat quietly until he finished his long song and dance. Then I said, ‘I am not prepared to accept any of the instructions you have given. Go back to Mr. Pearson and say I am not available.’ The Under Secretary said, ‘No, Lester Pearson needs you.’ I said, ‘If that is the case, I know Lester Pearson’s attitude and I support it and I will accept any advice he gives, but not along the lines you have given. Unless you arrange this, I will not go.’”
Canada’s prime minister supported Ronning, who flew to Washington to obtain the sanction of President Johnson. However, William Bundy, US Assistant Secretary of State put a snag in the deal by communicating to Johnson and US Secretary of State Dean Rusk his lack of enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, Dad left for Vietnam, stopping to visit us in Hong Kong where Top was The New York Times bureau chief. We lived high on a mountainside overlooking the South China Sea. When our cockatoo, Charlie, heard Dad’s hearty greeting, he yelled “Grandpa! Grandpa!” then screeched in Chinese “Ni wangbu dan (you turtles egg!)”. Charlie, who spoke both English and Chinese, had not seen Dad for a year, but he remembered that he spoke Chinese. Our cats and our children all came running to welcome their grandfather who, unbeknownst to us, was a secret agent on his way to North Vietnam on an ultra-classified mission to stop the War. While my father waited a signal from Hanoi that he was welcome, Top returned and we all went sailing on our Chinese junk the Valhalla. Only Top suspected something was fishy and suspected a good story.
On March 5, 1966, as Dad was preparing to leave for Saigon, Hong Kong was struck by a terrifying typhoon, and our car had disappeared into the eye of the hurricane. All mountain roads were closed. Dad was desperate. Our cook, Chen, came to the rescue. His beat-up jeep had survived the blustery weather. He claimed proudly that he could drive anywhere. Dad was enthusiastic. I was worried. Off they went on a hazardous trip to the airport. Chen returned exhilarated by his VIP mission. Later, at the foot of Repulse Bay Road, he recognized the license plate of the New York Times limo buried beneath a pile of blown-away autos.
Dad reached Saigon in time for pro forma meetings with top South Vietnamese leaders and American Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge who revealed that the USA had established new ports which would enable it to fly parallel bombing expeditions attacking simultaneously across the country “Nothing,” he said, “can stop us now. We are chewing them up!”
From Saigon, accompanied by the Canadian Commissioner of South Vietnam, Ronning flew to Hanoi via Vientiane, the capital of Laos. “Parts of Vietnam,” he said “looked like the surface of the moon—a scene of utter devastation. Large patches of jungle were burned out by napalm bombs, whole villages and fields had disappeared.”
You may wonder what all this has to do with a yellow vase but hold on. I will get there…..in our next episode……..