Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press

Introduction

vii Introduction TOM CURLEY AND JOHN MAXWELL HAMILTON at 3:24 p.m., may 7, 1945, the phone rang in the london bureau of the Associated Press. The newsroom, as later described, was filled with cigarette smoke and anticipation. Hitler and Mussolini were dead. The Russians were in Berlin. German forces had surrendered in Baldham, Breslau, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Allied forces occupied Flensburg, on the Danish border, where the caretaker Reich Government was now located. Allied heads of state were writing victory speeches, their staffs planning celebrations. But when would the war officially end? Now, with the ringing phone, the answer came. “This is Paris calling,” said a faint voice over a military line. Lewis Hawkins could not recognize the caller’s voice. He asked for verification. Edward Kennedy, the head of the Paris bureau, got on the phone. “This is Ed Kennedy, Lew. Germany has surrendered unconditionally. That’s surrendered unconditionally. That’s official. Make the date Reims, France, and get it out.” The London staff took dictation until the connection, which faded in and out, went dead in the middle of a quote from German general Alfred Jodl, chief of operations staff in the German High Command, who had signed the surrender document at Reims. Kennedy had sent about three hundred words. “Well,” said Kennedy to his staff after hanging up the phone, “now let’s see what happens.” Within minutes, the AP had the story out on the wires. Radio stations across the United States interrupted programming to announce the news. Newspapers flooded the streets with extra editions. Kennedy’s viii INTRODUCTION byline appeared under a highly unusual four-line headline spread across the front page of the New York Times. This should have been a moment of triumph for the AP war reporter. But it was not, as explained by a press report the next day: Edward Kennedy, chief of The Associated Press Western Front staff, who scored the news beat—acclaimed by editors throughout the United States as one of the greatest in newspaper history—was indefinitely suspended from all further dispatching facilities by Supreme Headquarters in Paris. What had Kennedy done wrong? He and sixteen other reporters had been allowed to witness the middle-of-the-night German surrender to General Dwight D. Eisenhower at his Reims headquarters on the condition of holding the story until given the green light. Then, on the afternoon of May 7, when the correspondents were back in Paris, a German radio broadcast from Flensburg announced the “unconditional capitulation of all fighting troops.” Kennedy, who suspected Allied forces had authorized the broadcast, considered the embargo voided and told a senior Army censor he no longer felt obliged to uphold the agreement. Using a military phone connection to London that was not subject to censorship , Kennedy broke the story. British censors, having no brief for handling surrender stories and, in any case, dealing with a story from abroad where other censors had responsibility, raised no objections. The lifting of Kennedy’s credentials was only the beginning of his troubles. Furious and embarrassed at being beaten, fellow correspondents the next day gathered at the Hotel Scribe, where Allied press operations were centralized, and voted 54–2 to condemn him for “the most disgraceful, deliberate and unethical double-cross in the history of journalism.” On May 10, midday New York time, the president of the AP board, Robert McLean of the Philadelphia Bulletin, came forth with a statement saying the AP “profoundly” regretted the story. Kent Cooper, the general manager of the AP, recalled Kennedy.* When the correspondent ’s ship landed in New York on June 4, Kennedy told the group of journalists who interviewed him that he had done nothing wrong. “I *Today the head of the AP board carries the title of chairman, not president; the chief executive officer (known as the general manager until 1985) is the president and CEO. INTRODUCTION ix would do it again. The war was over; there was no military security involved , and the people had the right to know.” At first put on indefinite suspension by Cooper, then quietly let go, his promising career with the Associated Press was over. Kennedy was forty years old. The owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press in California, who thought Kennedy was in the right, hired him as the paper’s managing editor. Kennedy was struck by...