Reporting America At War: An Oral History (compiled by Michelle Ferrari with commentary by James Tobin) is the companion book to a PBS series concerning war reporters from the Spanish Civil War to the Gulf War. It provides commentary from the reporters themselves or their colleagues for those deceased (Edward R. Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, and Homer Bigart). An excellent book with loads of insights. The PBS website provides loads of resources for those, like myself, who did not see the series itself.
Perhaps the most ironical statement in the book loses something because it is said by someone mostly edited out. Robert Capa, best known for his D-Day photos, comments (as do others) that the war correspondents have the special dispensation of being able to choose to avoid combat. The good war reporter, however, has a hard time doing this. Capa was killed in 1954 by a landmine in Vietnam, the first American correspondent to die in that conflict. A reminder that war correspondence is not only an essential, but sometimes deadly, profession.
Here are some choice quotes:
"At first the shells went over: you could hear the thud as they left the Fascists' guns, a sort of groaning cough; then you heard them fluttering toward you. As they came closer the sound went faster and straighter and sharper and then, very fast, you heard the great booming noise when they hit."
-- Martha Gellhorn
"In the future, I would hope that democracies will understand that the people have to know what their young people are doing in their name. When we got to Germany after the war, these rosy-cheeked German people came to us with tears in their eyes, pleading that they didn't know what was going on under Hitler. That was their fault. They bore responsibility because they approved the censorship that Hitler put in, and once they approved that censorship and the people were denied the right to know, they became as guilty as the perpetrators."
-- Walter Cronkite
Everyone said, "How the hell did we get in there with half a million men?" [Somebody said] it started when the Vietnamese needed a truck. We sent the truck and then we had to send a driver. But the driver needs two guys to guard them; and you need two guys to fix the truck. Then, when it breaks, they need another truck. That's how you got from nobody to half a million people."
-- Morley Safer
"If you look at Washington reporters, after a while they begin to look like congressmen. They survive by building relationships with people who are lying to them. My job as someone overseas is to write: 'This is a lie.' ...
Nobody sees war. Editors back in London or Paris or New York don't let anyone see war because it's so horrible. How can you run a video clip of a mother dying, watching blood spurt out of her arteries? How can you do it? No one ever sees war except people who are there."
-- Chris Hedges
"[W]e do have an effect, sometimes negative and sometimes positive, but we cannot make policy unless there is a policy vacuum. As long as an administration does not have a coherent policy, then that vacuum will be filled by television pictures or newspapers stories or radio reports. But as long as they have a policy, then I think our influence is the right one. We're able to bring the reality of what's going on -- the humanitarian situation, the political situation, the military situation."
"If you didn't have an independent and free press, you'd have propaganda -- ours, theirs, whoever's. You need a free press to sift through the propaganda and tell the story of what's going on, whether it's going well or badly. We are the brokers of information, and if we don't exist, a nation, a civil society, a democracy is poorer."
-- Christiane Amanpour
"It's all very well to say embedding brings you close to the marrow of combat, brings you close to the soldiers themselves, and gives you the feel of the situation. But I think there's a tremendous price to be paid. Getting too close to your subjects in your reporting can be very undesirable in some respects, and I think there was certainly some of that."
[Ward Just compares it to Vietnam, which was a "serial marriage," of various encounters, not just one]
"But there's always something missing when you concentrate so fully on action -- the exhaustion and the seething hatred that may have taken generations to build up, all sorts of subtleties that are missed in the heat of battle."
-- Malcom Browne