Press vs. Army: Front Action in an Old Battle

FUm & History, Vol. XXII, Nos. 1 & 2, February/May, 199211 Press vs. Army: Front Action in an Old Battle Liz Trotta One autumn day in 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman, the smoldering ruins of Georgia barely behind him, learned that three reporters traveling with his Army of the Tennessee had been captured by the rebels. The general also heard ~ falsely ~ that they had been executed. "Good," he snapped. "Now we'll have news from hell before breakfast!" While Sherman's view of the press may seem a little harsh in these days of affable public affairs officers and talky generals on the evening news, an ingrained and unshakable distrust ofjournalists has a long military history. It is something to consider in these days of huffing and puffing about "getting at the facts" of our posture in the Persian Gulf. During the Crimean War, Sir William Howard Russell, the "father of war correspondents," brought down Lord Aberdeen's government with dispatches about the command's treatment of its own troops. So loathed was Russell by the generals that he had to pitch a tent outside camp and almost starved during the Russian winter. In the Civil War, Russell dined with Lincoln, but was virtually run out of the country after his all-too-accurate reports of the Union army's collapse at Bull Run. The European high commands kept such close watch on newsmen in World War I that America's celebrity correspondent, Richard Harding Davis, packed up and went home, but not until after he had been arrested as a spy by the Germans. In Korea, correspondents, initially urged to censor themselves within the bounds of an ill-defined security and regard for morale, begged for official controls as competition led them into dangerous indiscretions. In the discordant '60s, Americans in their living rooms saw their sons wounded and dying. For the first time ~ and probably the last - battlefield access was not restricted, nor dispatches censored. News of the most highly dramatized failure in our history poured out of the hundreds of helicopters and jeeps available to reporters. The front ranks of American journalism are thick with those who got their first break covering Vietnam, righteously deciding that victory wasn't worth dying for - and, anyway, the fall of Goliath was a far better story. During the Tet Offensive of 1968, for example, the televised pictures of Viet Cong on the embassy lawn never caught up with the reality - that the enemy was severely punished and dispersed, a fact even Hanoi's commanders would admit years later. Liz Trotta, a former NBC and CBS News Correspondent, covered the Vietnam war and the Grenada invasion, both chronicled in Fighting for Air, due out in Aprilfrom Simon and Schuster. Herprescient views on military-press relations and the Gulf appeared long before the war (The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 13, 1990). We thank the Journal for permission to reprint this OpEd article. 12 Liz Trotta Even without the press's "help," from 1974 to 1983 our armed forces seemed punch drunk, bumping dazedly into one another; a C-5A evacuating orphans from Saigon crashed and burned; a botched attempt to rescue crewmen of the freighter Mayaguez from an island in the Gulf of Siam ended in a senseless accident ~ and then, most desperate of all, came bungling and disaster at Desert One. Nothing suggests that information will flow from the Middle East as once did Kuwaiti crude. Indeed, the hapless Pentagon media pool, now disbanded for Saudi Arabia, represented an effort to dispel suspicion that the brass still remembered the enthusiasm with which Vietnam's debacles had been aired. Never again would they let the press "lose" a war. Despite the earnest disclaimers of Defense Department spin artists and "enlightened" field commanders, the breach remains unrepaired. Military men cannot forget those humiliations and, despite revisionist assertions that the reporting from Southeast Asia had negligible effect on public opinion, they still taste the gall. They provided access - and got a bonus set of battle scars for their trouble. Such memories have become a legacy. Ask any cadet at West Point, any raw recruit what he thinks of newspeople. What's more, they no doubt reflect the...