Concealing the Ugliness of War
DUDMAN, RICHARD
Concealing the Ugliness of War RICHARD DUDMAN Every generation needs a detailed and documented reminder that governments lie to their people more than usual in time of war and that the press is...
...That reporter and that editor both knew the temptation and the opportunity that confront any war correspondent: Fiction often can be passed off as fact in the confusion of a war, and no one can tell the difference...
...That standard is quite a contrast to the instructions sent by Wilbur F. Storey, editor of The Chicago Times during the Civil War period, to one of his correspondents: ' 'Telegraph fully all news you can get and when there is no news send rumors...
...It is practically an encyclopedia of lies that were told and truths that were suppressed from the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 through the fall of Saigon in April 1975...
...He covered the war in Indochina from Saigon and Hanoi and from Phnom Penh and the insurgent side in Cambodia...
...But Knightley has an excellent grasp of what happens to the news between the battlefield event and the newspaper page or television screen...
...Why criticize both Life photographer Robert Capa for timidly holding up his camera to shoot blindly from a foxhole to get his lucky picture of a Spanish Loyalist soldier in his moment of death and also Floyd Gibbons for losing an eye by sticking his head up during a Marine attack near Belleau Wood...
...Among others, he cites Westbrook Pegler's two-sentence dispatch during World War I: "This correspondent had an interview with General Pershing today...
...Among Knightley's villains are the fakers, the daredevils, the willing propagandists, and especially the governments and censors and editors and reporters that collaborate to conceal the ugly side of war and make it seem heroic, exciting, and effective...
...Arthur Ponsonby, a member of the British Parliament, wrote one such book in 1928, Falsehood in Wartime, which recounted the lies of World War I and prepared readers for the lies to come in the Italo-Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II...
...Occasionally Knightley seems to fail to realize the terrible chaos of war...
...Knightley's hereos tend to be the courageous truth-seekers, the skeptics, and the rule-breakers...
...Concealing the Ugliness of War RICHARD DUDMAN Every generation needs a detailed and documented reminder that governments lie to their people more than usual in time of war and that the press is usually a witting or unwitting collaborator in the lying...
...In the Civil War, George Washington Stevens set a high standard of accuracy: "I vowed to state nothing on any authority unless I saw it myself or heard it from a European who had heard it...
...Sometimes Knightley is caught in contradictions...
...That interference in the middle is what keeps citizens from knowing what their governments are doing in their most serious and dangerous enterprise of all...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...The general said, 'Pegler, get the hell out of my office.' " Knightley sympathizes with Edward Kennedy of the Associated Press, not for sitting on the reporting of the World War II slapping episode of General George Patton at General Eisenhower's request but for breaking the embargo on the German surrender by double-crossing his fellow correspondents...
...Of the several hundred newsmen, generals, admirals, and government leaders who figure in Knightley's anecdotal history, there are some heroes and many villains...
...Richard Dudman is chief Washington correspondent for the St...
...As Tolstoy made clear in War and Peace, it can be impossible in a battle to get any sort of big picture or to tell who is winning or losing...
...The latest service, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam, is written by Phillip Knightley, a special correspondent of the Sunday Times of London...
Vol. 40 • January 1976 • No. 1
