Renowned journo Topping dead at 99

New York, November 8

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Seymour Topping, among the most accomplished foreign correspondents of his generation for The Associated Press and the New York Times and later a top editor at the Times and administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday. He was 99.

Topping passed away “peacefully” at White Plains Hospital, his daughter Rebecca said in an emailed statement.

As a correspondent for the AP in 1949, he was eyewitness to the fall of Nanking, then the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, to Mao Zedong’s Red Army. It was the key victory in the Communist conquest of China, and Topping was first to report it to the world.

He had stints in Hong Kong, French Indochina, Vietnam, Moscow and other countries. He served as administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University and simultaneously held the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism Chair at Columbia Journalism School. — Agencies