This Warring Century - CJR, September/October 1999

September/October 1999 | Contents

the century
This Warring Century
In two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Kosovo, and scores of conflicts in between, journalists from Richard Harding Davis to Christiane Amanpour have struggled to get their stories told - sometimes under tough military restrictions. Here's the latest in CJR's Millennium series on newsgathering over the past ten decades, chronicling how the media fight for battlefield information and how the armed forces strive to control it.

By H.D.S. GREENWAY
H.D.S. Greenway covered conflict in Indochina, Pakistan, the Middle East, and the Balkans for Time, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is currently the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe.

Basically, the military authorities have three concerns. They don’t want journalists reporting information that could alert the enemy and get soldiers killed. They don’t want the home front demoralized. And, as in any bureaucracy, they don’t want their own mistakes and incompetence exposed. War correspondents usually accept and respect the first concern and utterly reject the last. It is the question of what constitutes demoralizing the home front, as opposed to giving the public what it needs to know, that has caused most of the problems between the news trade and the warriors. "Public opinion wins wars," General Eisenhower told newspaper editors during World War II. He considered reporters attached to his headquarters as "quasi-staff officers," and for the most part they acted that way.

Winston Churchill criticized pessimistic reporting from the Anzio beachhead in 1944. "Such words as ‘desperate’ ought not to be used about the position in a battle of this kind when they are false," he declared. "Still less should they be used if they were true."

In America’s undeclared wars – in which the reasons why we fought were less clear – disagreements festered on how much the American people should know and not know. The AP’s Tom Lambert and the UP’s Peter Kalischer were banned from Korea in 1950 for writing stories about the panic, lack of equipment, and disarray of American forces caught in the North Korean attack. They had disclosed information that would have a "bad moral and psychological effect," the army said. General MacArthur lifted the ban, but told the two reporters they had a "responsibility in the matter of psychological warfare." When David McConnell of the New York Herald Tribune reported that an American bomber had strafed the truce talk zone, he was told by the military not to "forget which side you’re on." Years later, in Vietnam, Admiral Harry Felt repeated this admonition to Malcolm Browne of the AP: "Why don’t you get on the team?"

The American century began in 1898 with the capture of the Spanish empire, when newspapers were at their most irrepressible best and irresponsible worst.

The famous alleged telegraph exchange between William Randolph Hearst and his combat artist in Florida tells the story. "Everything is quiet . . . . There will be no war . . . I wish to return," Frederic Remington cabled. Hearst replied: "Please remain. You furnish pictures. I will furnish war."

When the war came censorship came with it. But this did not stop publication of wild, misleading, and just plain untrue stories in what came to be called the yellow press. Battles that never took place were reported, not so much by correspondents in the field, but by Washington bureaus, and in the fevered imaginations of editors back home. Perhaps never before or since did American journalism better prove the old dictum attributed to Senator Hiram Johnson: The first casualty of war is truth.

Censorship wasn’t fool-proof. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous American war correspondent of his time, got into trouble for describing how worn out American troops were, "hanging to the crest of the San Juan hills by their teeth and fingernails." The story was printed in the New York Herald on July 7, 1898, and re-cabled to the Paris Herald, where the Spanish embassy forwarded it to Madrid. Spain alerted their besieged Santiago garrison, allegedly giving them increased hope, and encouraging them to hold out longer. The Santiago garrison soon surrendered, so Davis was off the hook. But the danger of modern communication, and how news might be flashed around the world and used by an enemy, had been established. No longer did news travel by slow boat.

There is a direct link between Davis’s story and CNN’s realization in the gulf war that news about where the missiles were landing in Tel Aviv might be useful to Saddam Hussein rocketeers.

Relations between reporters and the military authorities became even more strained during World War I. Correspondents had to swear to "convey the truth to the people of the United States," but refrain from disclosing news that might help the enemy. Newspapers had to pay $1,000 to the army to cover each correspondent’s equipment and maintenance, and post a $10,000 bond – an immense sum in those days – to be forfeited if a reporter didn’t follow the military rules.

Frederick Palmer, who had been the only American war correspondent accredited to the British Army, became the American army’s chief press overlord and censor – a poacher turned game-keeper. Later, Palmer would speak of his "double life" during the war, in which he served as a "public liar to keep up the spirit of the armies and the peoples of our side."

When Westbrook Pegler in the winter of 1917-1918 broke censorship to expose how ill the army was housed and equipped, the army said he was too young and inexperienced and tried to get the United Press to recall him – much the same as the White House tried to have David Halberstam recalled from Vietnam more than forty years later, only in Pegler’s case the army succeeded. "Censorship is developing more in the news interests of the military than in that of the American reader," Pegler wrote.

Henrietta Eleanor Hull became the first accredited American woman war correspondent in a day when women didn’t even have the vote. Her articles, bylined "Peggy," in the Chicago Tribune, were Ernie Pyle-style stories about the daily lives of ordinary soldiers. Hull was "a victim of male rivals," Phillip Knightley wrote in The First Casualty, his celebrated book on war correspondents. She was never allowed to witness combat, forbidden to visit training camps and hospitals, and was forced to wait out the war in Paris.

When America entered World War II, Washington quickly set up an Office of Censorship and an Office of War Information to handle the flow of news. Knightley quotes an American censor: "Newspapers . . . and broadcasting stations must be as actively behind the war effort as merchants or manufacturers." Total war would require journalists’ total compliance, and for the most part that’s what the military got in what would be America’s last truly patriotic war.

Women war correspondents came into their own during World War II, finally prevailing against prejudices. At first they were relegated to behind-the-lines reporting, like Hull. But women such as Helen Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Daily News, Martha Gellhorn writing for Collier’s, and photographer Margaret Bourke-White of Life managed to join the fray and gradually won acceptance.

The incident of General George Patton slapping a soldier in Sicily is indicative of how World War II reporters stayed on the team. Visiting a field hospital, Patton had slapped a shell-shocked soldier he thought was shirking his duty. Reporters witnessed the slapping. Edward Kennedy of AP tried to persuade Eisenhower that, since the news was bound to leak out, it ought to come from correspondents who were on the scene.

Ike said that he personally felt such a disclosure would be of great value to the enemy as propaganda, and made a personal request to the reporters to sit on it. And they did. Drew Pearson finally broke the story in Washington three months later.

In the first desperate days of the Korean conflict, there was no military censorship, and reporters freely wrote about despair and disorganization as U.S. forces suffered battlefield setbacks. Marguerite Higgins and Homer Bigart, both of the New York Herald Tribune (they loathed each other), won Pulitzer Prizes in Korea in a bitter rivalry. Censorship became total after the front settled down for the long negotiation along the cease-fire line. Correspondents were not allowed to talk to negotiators. Information was confined to a daily briefing by the United Nations command. But for all the difficulties, most reporters signed on to the notion that the press and the military were on the same side. "The correspondents in Korea were still awash in the patriotic fever of World War II," wrote James Greenfield of The New York Times forty years after the war. Few reporters "expended any ink debating whether the U.S. should be waging a war in Korea at all . . . ."

Not so in Vietnam. At first correspondents there were inclined to support the American effort, even if they weren’t "on the team." Later they questioned the war itself. Towards the end, radicalized by the sixties, some saw the American military as oppressors and imperialists – an attitude the military never forgave.

Early on, young reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan of The New York Times, and Malcolm Browne of AP, battled military officials who, at first, hoped to conceal the extent of the growing American involvement, and then wanted the press to minimize the mounting number of South Vietnamese defeats.

Tet, the countrywide attack in 1968 during a Vietnamese holiday, was the war’s turning point and remains mired in controversy. Did the press over-react spreading doom and gloom? Was Tet only a temporary setback for the war effort, or did it expose the official American optimism as a fraud? The Viet Cong were decimated, but Tet showed that the light at the end of the tunnel was an illusion. Americans began to question whether the war was winnable at any cost the country was willing to pay. After Tet, America began trying to disengage rather than win.

Television by now was the main source of information for most Americans, and the images on the screen – at first in black and white – changed war reporting forever. Morley Safer’s exposé of American soldiers burning a village had a huge impact on viewers at home, and added to the military’s mistrust of reporters. But there was never any official censorship. In Vietnam correspondents were made honorary majors – World War II reporters had the momentary rank of captain – and could travel anywhere on military transport if space were available. The only condition: that they not betray troop movements, a request that was respected. The press battles were over misleading briefings in Saigon and Washington, which ran contrary to what the reporters could see for themselves in the field.

In Cambodia, Sidney Schanberg reporting for The New York Times caught the eventual decline and fall of the American-sponsored republic as did no other. He was one of the few eyewitnesses to the fall of Phnom Penh and the beginning of the unparalleled horror visited upon Cambodia. In both Laos and Cambodia, a censorship-at-source was imposed by the American embassies trying to keep reporters ignorant of what was going on. Sylvana Foa of UPI broke the story that the American Embassy in Phnom Penh was directing airstrikes over Cambodia – a level of involvement the embassy had denied – by buying a cheap radio that could pick up the frequencies the pilots and the embassy were using.

To this day, some military men glumly insist that television and the press lost the war in Vietnam by demoralizing the home front. The case for the correspondents was best made by James Reston of The New York Times. "In the long history of the war," he wrote, "the reporters have been more honest with the American people than the officials." But the U.S. military would never again allow such access to its operations as it did in Vietnam.

In 1983 the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in an effort to prevent what the U.S. government perceived as a Marxist threat to the hemisphere. Unlike the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, reporters were excluded entirely from the invasion force. (Some reporters – notably Bernard Dietrich of Time – managed to get onto the embattled island by hiring boats. Dietrich was able to hear military communiqués on radio describing events he knew had not happened.) After a firestorm of complaints, the Pentagon adopted a pool system to be activated the next time U.S. troops went into action. Its first test was the so-called tanker war in the eighties when selected reporters were allowed aboard Navy ships escorting oil tankers through the Persian Gulf. "That pool system was preferable to the alternative," says the AP’s Richard Pyle, which would have meant news-by-Pentagon-briefing with no reporters on site.

The Somalia operation of 1992-1993 was a television-driven event from beginning to end. TV news images of starving Somalis drove the Bush administration to intervene, and television’s coverage of a dead American pilot being dragged through the streets brought the intervention to a close under President Clinton. The enduring image of the initial landing was American assault troops crawling up the beaches at night with TV crews crawling backwards ahead of them, filming every move.

In Haiti, 1994-1995, the American intervention was marked by cooperation – "by far the most cordial and workable press-army relationship I have been involved in," says Douglas Farah of The Washington Post.

But Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Haiti were small sideshows compared to the dramatic, pyrotechnic air war by U.S. and allied forces over Iraq, followed by four days of intense fighting known as the gulf war. It was the biggest U.S. military operation since Vietnam, but in terms of press restrictions, it was the worst. The ground rules: no reporting of troop movements, and no access to battle zones except in organized groups of pool reporters and cameramen. Unauthorized visits to combat units could result in a lifting of press credentials. Dispatches and film would be censored, but only – the Pentagon promised – for military security, not to avoid criticism or embarrassment.

But the 1,600 U.S. reporters in the war zone at the height of the fighting were so curtailed that not even interviews with nurses and doctors in rear areas were permitted without military escorts. The American public was dependent for its news on military briefings far from the scene, which the military conducted with great skill. During the lead-up to the shooting war, some reporters got around the restrictions simply by ignoring them, or attaching themselves to foreign armies. For example, Michael Kelly, stringing for The New Republic and The Boston Globe, joined Egyptian forces. The most respected newsman in the country, Walter Cronkite, rose out of retirement to complain before Congress that the unprecedented press restrictions "trampled on the public’s right to know," while the Pentagon insisted that a modern, fast-moving war could not possibly accommodate unlimited numbers of reporters in battle.

Once the shooting began, however, restrictions fell away. Tony Clifton of Newsweek rode into Desert Storm combat with the American tanks, a feat that no reporter achieved in the desert war against General Erwin Rommel in World War II. Clifton described an Iraqi tank that "disintegrated into enormous fragments; the turret, weighing several tons, flew twenty feet into the air like the lid of a giant garbage can. The tracers set off black and scarlet fireballs and brilliant white showers as gas-storage tanks and munitions went up. A strong wind was blowing from behind us, so we rushed ahead wreathed in the black and white smoke from our burning quarry." But mostly, in those final one hundred hours, the gulf war was a nightmare of censorship, limited access, and bungled pools. The pendulum that allowed unfettered freedom to report the news in Vietnam had swung sharply back towards controlling the news. George Esper, who led the Associated Press’s war coverage from Saudi Arabia, says that the military followed "a pattern obviously designed to hide the horrors of war, especially American casualties."

But this time, the press was just not going to take it anymore. After heavy pressure from news organizations, the Pentagon agreed to new guidelines – no pools unless there is no other feasible way of accommodating the press; journalists to be provided access to military units; public affairs officers to act as liaisons but not to interfere with reporting; field commands to permit journalists to ride on military vehicles and aircraft whenever feasible. Said the AP’s president Louis Boccardi: "The guidelines offer the promise of the kind of coverage the citizens of a democracy are entitled to have, while they also recognize the need for security ground rules in combat zones."

In place now is a Department of Defense National Media Pool, representing television, newspapers, magazines, radio, and wire services. Its forty-four members are rotated on a regular basis. It is by necessity Washington-based, as the "deployables" (as the Defense Department calls them), will have only four hours to get to Andrews Air Force base when a military operation is about to occur. They will not be told where they are going.

In the years since the press reported on Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, war coverage has experienced breathtaking changes. First radio, and then television arrived to take away the ascendancy of print, and now the Internet is emerging as a reporting tool. Reporters today are freed from the need to find a telegraph office or even a telephone line to get their stories out. Words and film can be transmitted by satellite, and the equipment needed to perform this technological wizardry is getting smaller and cheaper. No longer will reporters spend more time finding a way to file than reporting the news.

Gender discrimination is no longer tenable. Imagine Christiane Amanpour putting up with behind-the-lines assignments that were forced on Peggy Hull in 1918.

On the negative side, few reporters today have any background in military matters. Since the end of conscription, a generation of Americans has grown up without having served in the military, and this contributes to the widening gulf between reporters and soldiers. But for all the technology, reporting, and photographing, war still means living dangerously and occasionally dying young. In all, more than fifty U.S. newspeople have been killed in the U.S. combat actions since the end of World War II.

The tension between the military and the press will never cease, because both need each other, but cannot grant the other what it really wants. Absolute freedom to print or film everything is not possible in wartime, nor is it possible in a democracy to turn the media into organs of state propaganda.

In the century’s final year the U.S. military was at war again, this time in the Balkans, and the press protested yet again that the flow of information was too rigidly controlled. In April, news executives from The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, AP, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal wrote Secretary of Defense William Cohen complaining that the flow of news from the Balkan campaign was being even more tightly held than in the gulf war. "We of course recognize your need to withhold information that would jeopardize ongoing military operations . . .," the editors wrote. "But, at a minimum we believe that the department should make public its information on what targets in Yugoslavia have been hit . . . ."

Richard Harding Davis made the same point in 1914. Speaking for all the century’s combat correspondents, he wrote: In war "the world has a right to know, not what is going to happen next, but at least what has happened." Some things never change.