A fresh contribution to the history of journalism.
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Drawing on abundant archival sources, unpublished memoirs, military documents, and hundreds of editorials and articles, Fine presents a meticulous examination of the fraught relationship between the military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.Pub Date: April 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781501765940
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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