2023-01-31
The fierce controversy over a reporter’s wartime disclosure.
Drawing on abundant archival sources, unpublished memoirs, military documents, and hundreds of editorials and articles, Fine presents a meticulous examination of the fraught relationship between the military and the media during World War II. He focuses on the “surrender episode,” when Edward Kennedy, a respected Associated Press reporter, broke the news of Germany’s surrender despite the U.S. military’s insistence on a 36-hour embargo. “The Kennedy affair,” Fine writes, “is the story of government officials trying to bend the media to their own ends and of one journalist who risked much to do what he thought of as his duty—to inform a public sick of the fighting that the war in Europe had ended.” When Germany surrendered to the Allies in the early hours of May 7, 1945, 17 journalists were allowed to witness the event held at Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, and they felt frustrated about not being allowed to file their eyewitness reports. Kennedy’s decision to do so was met with immediate praise from some quarters and repudiation from others, including journalists who had been scooped. By September 1945, AP, which had supported him at first, fired him. Fine’s illuminating history reveals the competitive nature of the news business, rivalries among news agencies and reporters, and volatile tensions between the military and the press that persisted throughout the war. The army’s public relations and censorship offices, writes the author, “focused more on getting out the military’s story than aiding independent reporters in getting out theirs.” Despite a nostalgic view that the war promoted cooperative efforts, the relationship was blighted by inconsistent censorship rulings and “conflicting information imperatives—the press’s to reveal and the military’s to conceal.” The “surrender saga,” Fine notes, “also calls into question another bromide about the war—that it was well-reported.” The book includes photographs of individuals involved.
A fresh contribution to the history of journalism.
