Karnow has traveled on assignment with Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon, whom he accompanied on his historic trip to China in 1972. He was in Vietnam when the first Americans were killed in 1959 and covered the war until its conclusion. A graduate of Harvard, he attended the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris; and was a Nieman Fellow and Kennedy Fellow at Harvard. Karnow is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of Historians and the Century Association. During World War II, he served with the U.S. Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India theater of operations.