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37 MY SO-CALLED MILITARY CAREER i as not eager to go to the other side of the world to fight, so I joined the Mississippi National Guard along with my brother, Kenny, and my friend Al Rushing. I figured I could make a little extra money and perhaps stay out of Korea. We became members of Biloxi’s Battery C of the 115th Anti-Aircraft Gun Battalion. Because I was a reporter and could help with public relations and even write stories for the Herald about the National Guard, I was soon promoted to staff sergeant, a rank few of my colleagues ever attained. In fact my father never rose above corporal despite his meritorious service in World War II. In May of 1951, with more reserves being called to duty because of extensive fighting in Korea, the 115th Battalion was federalized and ordered to Camp Stewart (now Fort Stewart), Georgia, then an anti-aircraft training center. The camp was huge, covering nearly three hundred thousand acres and extending into five counties—the largest military installation east of the Mississippi River. I immediately telephoned Lt. Albert Bacleda, the public information officer at Camp Stewart, and asked if he needed an assistant who had three and a half years of experience as a reporter. Bacleda said he did, and after I arrived at Camp Stewart with Battery C, he arranged for me to be transferred to the camp headquarters unit and assigned to PIO as a public information supervisor. I had never undergone basic training or virtually any military training whatsoever. But I was good at what Bacleda thought was important—the ability to get my superiors’ names and outfits in the paper. Back in Biloxi the prime applicant for my job as a reporter at the Herald was Dick Lightsey, who booked horses and baseball games at the 20th Century Pool Hall, a favorite hangout for young Biloxians. Eisendrath Chapter 6 38 my so-called military career hired him, but only after Lightsey agreed to cut his ties to the pool hall and its gambling operations. Years later Lightsey chuckled as he told me how Eisendrath wanted him to cover the Kefauver subcommittee’s hearings on gambling. “I wouldn’t do it,” Lightsey said. “Hell, Jack, I thought they were gonna call me as a witness!” During my so-called military service as a public information supervisor at Camp Stewart it quickly became clear that to get the camp and its commanding general publicity I needed to develop relations with the local news media. What better way to do it in those days than to work for the media? So that’s what I did, moonlighting part-time for both the Savannah Morning News, about forty miles away, and the weekly Liberty County Herald in adjacent Hinesville, as well as occasionally writing for the Atlanta Constitution. I also realized that in order to persuade the local media to publish positive news, it helped to play it straight when the news was negative. So, following a policy that most public relations professionals would probably consider laughable, or at the very least counterproductive, I never held back on negative incidents, going so far as to supply editors with detailed reports. When a soldier walked into the main post exchange and shot his wife to death, then shot himself, I quickly alerted an editor at the Savannah Morning News. Within a couple of hours, I telephoned the editor the full story of what happened. And when Col. Lloyd A. Corchran, then the acting post commander, was shot to death while hunting turkeys on the Camp Stewart reservation , I quickly got the news out to the Morning News and the Constitution . After Drew Pearson reported in a radio broadcast that Corchran had been murdered, I quickly put out the word that an investigation showed that the colonel had been accidentally shot to death while crouched behind some bushes and sounding a turkey yelper. Later, I informed the media that a hunting companion, a chief warrant officer on the base and a survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II, had confessed to investigators that he had mistaken Corchran for a turkey and shot him. My military superiors supported my information policy of providing good and bad news because they saw that it paid off. And newspaper editors were so pleased to get such unaccustomed cooperation from the military that they returned the favor. News releases about events such...

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