Remembering Nieman curator, historian, writer

Remembering Nieman curator, historian, writer

Sabam Siagian, The Jakarta Post, Editor at Large, Nieman Fellow Class '79

Prof. James C. Thomson, former Nieman Foundation curator (director), East Asia historian, college professor and a key figure in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s, died Sunday, Aug. 4, 2002, in Massachusetts at Newton- Wellesley Hospital of cardiac arrest after a brief illness. He was 70 years old.

A memorial service was held on Sept. 12, 2002 at Harvard Memorial Church followed by a reception hosted by the Nieman Foundation.

The Nieman fellowships were established at Harvard University in 1938 as the first mid-term career education program for working journalists. A bequest of US$1 million from Agus Wahl Nieman, widow of the founder of the Milwaukee Journal, instructed the university to spend the money "...to promote and elevate the standards of journalism..." and educate persons deemed specially qualified for journalism.

Since Harvard's board of overseers did not quite know what to do with the money in concrete terms while establishing a school of journalism was then considered below Harvard's dignity, advice was sought from Walter Lippmann, the prominent journalist and political thinker.

Lippmann advised that Harvard each year allow a number of mid- career journalists to be part of the Harvard community for one academic year as a novel experiment. That advice was accepted and implemented.

Each year, 25 journalists from the U.S. and abroad are selected in a competition process and awarded Nieman Fellowships. The fellows spend one full academic year at Harvard, engaged in the intellectual life of the university. They can attend any courses they are interested in and have a wide range of choices, from "the History of American Jazz" to "War and Peace in the Nuclear Age".

During his 12 years as Curator (1972-1984), Jim Thomson broadened the Nieman Fellowships to include more minorities, women and journalists from small news organizations and broadcasting.

I was accepted as a Nieman fellow for the academic year of 1978-1979. My application was actually submitted way past the deadline, since I had to overcome the agonizing problem of leaving my active job of deputy chief editor of a lively afternoon newspaper and my family and yielding to the irresistible temptation to be at Harvard as practically an "intellectual tourist."

It was the late Ambassador Soedjatmoko, a Harvard alumni, who urged me to take the opportunity and who wrote the necessary recommendations to secure the funding for my program.

When I arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in early September 1978, foul weather had already set in. The Nieman Foundation had just acquired its first home, a unique house built in the New England style of architecture, which was the former home of the university's chief carpenter. It was appropriately named as Walter Lippmann House.

When I reported my arrival to Jim Thomson and thanked him for cutting the university's bureaucratic red tape so that I could still be accepted on time, he responded with his sardonic wit that I was to become familiar with during the coming months.

With a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other, he said, half-seriously and half-humorously: "Well, in the long history of this Nieman program you are the first Indonesian journalist accepted.

"I persuaded my colleagues to be somewhat lenient in accepting our first Indonesian since we need to indoctrinate him with our American democratic values, lest General Soeharto's regime corrupts the entire Indonesian press."

A twinkle in his eyes told me he was just teasing. As a matter of fact, during the entire academic year he never talked about the superiority of American values.

Jim was the third curator (an esoteric name for director, as if the Nieman fellows were museum pieces) of the Nieman Foundation from 1972 to 1984. His parents were missionaries in China, teaching at the Christian College in Nanking. Jim was brought up in China until the age of six, but later continued his interest in China and was proficient in the Chinese language. The title of his Phd dissertation that he wrote at Harvard is: "While China Faces the West."

When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Jim Thomson, like so many other bright, educated Americans, joined the government. He was working for the State Department under Secretary Chester Bowles. In 1964 MacGeorge Bundy, the former dean of Harvard College who was heading the National Security Council at the White House, asked Jim to join him.

As Jim told me, MacGeorge Bundy, who was known to have a brilliant and incisive mind and was an exponent of the Eastern establishment, said: "Jim, this Vietnam business is getting more serious. I need somebody who has at least some historical background of the region and who has the intellectual honesty to prepare for me an accurate assessment of the U.S. involvement. A person who is not easily over-awed, either by this place (the White House) or its occupants."

As it turned out, Jim Thomson became the in-house dissenter who had serious doubts whether the U.S. sacrifice in Vietnam served America's strategic interest. In 1966, he left the White House totally exhausted, mentally and physically. He then joined the Harvard faculty as assistant professor of East Asian history.

In April 1968, the Atlantic Monthly published Jim Thomson's long essay under the title How Could Vietnam Happen? - An Autopsy. It was a brutal assessment of how a world superpower that possessed ample military strength and was governed by "the best and brightest" could stumble in a war that had no clear strategic purpose.

It won the Overseas Press Club Award and influenced a generation of reporters and policy analysts. MacGeorge Bundy was very upset about that article. It was not that he disagreed entirely with Jim Thomson's analysis, but he thought it was a serious breach, coming from a former White House official who should show loyalty to the president.

In spring 1979, David Halberstam, the former New York Times correspondent in Saigon who wrote what is now considered the best book on the U.S. involvement in Vietnam (The Best and the Brightest), came to Walter Lippmann House to address the Nieman fellows. From the exchanges between Jim Thomson and David Halberstam I instinctively knew that Jim must have been the "Deep Throat" for some intimate White House revelations in that book.

After terminating his assignment as Curator of Harvard's Nieman's Foundation in 1984, Jim joined Boston University as professor of international relations.

Looking back, the experience that I consider most valuable during that one academic year at Harvard, besides attending the classes, is my getting acquainted with Jim Thomson. He was a man who at one time was involved in the highest councils of decision making in the U.S., who knew about the trappings and temptations of power centers, yet who maintained a balanced view and a sober realism about life. He told me once that what was important in occupying a lofty bureaucratic position was to always maintain one's moral and intellectual courage to submit a realistic policy recommendation.

I kept remembering Jim Thomson's words when I became ambassador to Australia (1991-1995), but I never had the chance to thank him for that wise counsel. The Nieman fellows from Indonesia in the succeeding years under different Curators are Goenawan Mohamad (Tempo newsweekly), Ratih Hardjono (Kompas daily) and Andreas Harsono (Institute for Free Flow of Information Studies).