this week, "american history tv." tonight, reflections on world war ii. first, a look at censorship during the second world war. in an hour, the three original members of the band of brothers from the 101st airborne division. "american history tv" in primetime all week on c-span3. this is c-span3 with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week and every weekend, 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on "american history tv." get our schedules and see past programs at our websites. and you can join in the conversation on social media sites.

"american history tv" in primetime continues tomorrow night. we start at 8:00 eastern with a look at the presidency and civil rights. we'll hear from historian, civil rights leaders and former white house staff members from fdr's presidency to today. "american history tv" in primetime all week on c-span3. next on american history tv, a discussion on world war ii reporting and censorship and the experience of associated press reporter ed kennedy. mr. kennedy was fired in 1945 after he defied a military embargo by reporting on germany's surrender a day before the official announcement. in early may of this year, the associated press apologized for having fired kennedy. the national press club hosted this one-hour event. >> good anning, everyone, and welcome to the national did

press club. i'm rick dunham for the hearst newspapers and "the houston chronicle" and president of the national press club journal institute which is the educational and charitable arm of the national press club that handles everything from the cutting-edge journalism training to book racks and other book events at the national press club. this is event, among other things, a fund-raiser for the press club journalism institute and the good programs we do so that every book you buy, not only will benefit the authors as it should but will benefit the national press club journalism institute. if you haven't already bought the book, i would recommend it. and that's the end of my ad there. i want to briefly introduce our guests to set the stage and then we have a special guest, the -- daughter of the man we will be talking about who will introduce our discussion. first up, i actually do have one

short ad for the upcoming programs that we will be having training programs on may 22. we will be talking about building a community and building your brand on twitter. and in fact, i'm going to be the instructor for that class. may 29th, don't fear the math. turning numbers into stories and stories into award winners. part of our data power journalism series. on june 12th, social media trends for social media managers taught by amy webb of webb media who really is one of the leading trend-spotters in the country. and june 25th, excelling at data reporting. another part of our data power journalism series. with that, let me talk about the book a bit. and to me, it's pretty personal. two summers ago i was driving around northern france with my wife and then 16-year-old nephew and we stopped at a small schoolhouse in reims. we went into the museum there.

at it was the table at which the germans surrendered, where general alfred yodel signed the official documents as the germans surrendered to the allies. there were photographs of famous war correspondents such as andy rooney and ed kennedy of the associated press and that's where i started my personal search for the story of ed kennedy. it -- it told snippets at the museum of -- of -- this distinguished journalist and ever since then, i have been reading all i can culminating with this book we will be discussing today. and for people who don't know in -- in detail, ed kennedy was one of the most famous of the war correspondents of world war ii, and on may 7th, he became the most famous or infamous

american correspondent of the war. army officials that day allowed a select number of reporters, including him, to witness the historic moment of the surrender but they instructed them that the story once was under strict military imbar go. in a move that was courageous but eventually costly, ed kennedy defied the embargo after the news was broken out of berlin. and -- and the scoop generated tons of interest and instant controversy. the rival news organizations, including hearst international news service, were quick to protest and the ap first publicly rebuked and ultimately dismissed ed kennedy. a little bit of background on him during his time as a foreign correspondent, he covered the spanish civil war, the rise of

mussolini, unrest in greek ethnic feuding in the balkans which we saw come back again 60 years later. during world war ii, he reported from greece, from italy, from north africa, from the middle east, before going to cover the liberation and eventually the surrender negotiations. so let me just introduce our panel and then i will turn the floor over to julie kennedy cochran for a few words. the -- we have the two authors of the forward to this book. john maxwell hamilton who is executive vice chancellor and provost at louisiana state university. better known to all of us as lsu. he came to lsu in 1992 after more than 20 years as a journalist and public servant. most of that time he worked on foreign affairs. both from the covering and the taking part. and before he assumed his current position at lsu, he was the founding dean of the manship school of mass communication.

he was a reporter for the "milwaukee journal," ""christian science monitor"," abc radio. longtime commentator for marketplace which is broadcast nationally by public radio international. in his government work he oversaw nuclear non-proliferation issues for house foreign affairs committee, advised the head of the u.s. foreign aid program in asia during the carter administration and managed world bank program to educate americans about economic development. in the course of his career he has gone to more than 50 countries in africa, asia, europe, and latin america. so he has both covered the foreign news and he's also written extensively on foreign news gathering and sought to improve the quality of it. and next to him is a man that doesn't need an introduction but i will anyway. tom curly. tom curly became president and chief executive officer of associated press, also known as ap, on june 1st, 2003.

he's the 12th person to lead ap since its founding in 1846. and under his dynamic leadership, ap is evolving, has evolved from a wire service into an interactive global news network. and at the same time that he's worked on the changing technology of news, he has been deeply committed to the people's right to know, and he's been one of the country's most visible and aggressive advocates for open government. and in my other extracurricular role as a member of the steering committee of reporters committee for freedom of the press, we have worked very closely with tom, establishing coalition of news organizations and journalism-related groups pushing for accessible, accountable, and open government. and just quick bio on him. he started early like i did in journalism. i started 17, he started at 15. writing for the "easton express."

pennsylvania hometown of easton. after graduation from la salle and rochester institute of technology he got a job as editor at the "rochester times union." he worked his way up and up and up and by 1991, he was president and publisher of "usa today." the nation's largest selling daily newspaper. he also from 1998 to 2003 was president -- vice president of senior vice president of the newspaper, owner, newspaper's owner, gannett. publisher of more than 100 daily newspapers in the united states. tom is retiring from ap at the end of the year. but we will talk about some breaking news from ap in a few minutes. with that, let me turn the floor over to julia kennedy cochran to talk to -- introduce the program and talk a little about her father and also thank members of the family for being here. we are very glad you are all here. thanks. julia?

>> good evening and thank you all for being here. three, four years ago when i started this project to publish my father's memoir, which he hadn't been able to get published during his lifetime, it was with great trepidation i wrote a letter to tom curly asking for the ap's help. because, as you know, it had been 60-odd years since my father had been fired by the ap and we had never heard anything from them about it. in fact, i myself worked for the ap for three years right after college as a reporter on the new york city desk and nobody ever spoke to me about it during that time. so i expected that either they would ignore me or just tell me that they weren't interested in

helping me. it was with pleasant surprise that i found that tom was very willing to help me and allowed me to use the ap archives, and for that i also thank valerie camor, who is head of the ap archives, to do research on my father's time at the ap. then i was surprised to find that tom agreed to co-write the introduction to the book. and it's a very powerful introduction for any of you who have already read it. drawing on a lot of ap corporate communications, internal communications, and material from the national archives that i didn't even know existed. then last week, the ap issued its public apology for firing my father over the surrender incident. my phone began ringing off the hook.

i am really surprised at how much interest there still is in this old story. i guess it really just shows that freedom of the press is still an important issue these days. thank you very much. i would like to just mention that several members of my family are here tonight. they include my husband, ron cochran. my daughter emma ricardi and her husband steve. and my dear cousins, thurston balfour and daughter renee. thurston is probably the only person in the room who knew my father during world war ii. so -- he has talked to me a lot about that. so -- thank you very much. >> thanks, julia and thanks to everyone from the family for being here. why don't i -- before starting to ask questions just turn the

floor over and whichever order you would like just to start things out and then i will -- i will start with some questions. >> good. i will be briefer than i thought i was going to be because you covered some of the points that i was thinking of making. this -- this story is one of great drama. and i think -- and as kennedy himself says in the book and as tom and i try to highlight in the introduction, it was a monumental news story in which a reporter had a choice and part of that choice was deciding whether to honor the pledge that had all of these 17 reporters who had gone to reims would honor about not breaking the story until they were allowed to, or deciding to break it because they felt the reasons for the embargo had been obviated by the government.

the government pledged -- roosevelt pledged the censorship would only be applied to stories that had military significance. whereas, in fact, this was a story that was being held, that is the announcement of the d-day -- sorry, v-e day was being held because the russian wanted to hold it back so they would be able to announce it simultaneously. that was a political reason, not a military reason. and so as a result of that, ed kennedy had to decide what he was going to do with the story. and he came back and he was very angry. he became -- he was -- he was alerted to the fact that the germans announced -- the german government announced over the radio that the war was over and troops should prepare to step down, in german. flendburg was where the german government at the end of the war was.

at this point, germans had virtually -- more than virtually. they had virtually lost, they had really lost, in fact the radio station was really controlled by the allies. and so from kennedy's point of view, the war really was over and the embargo had also been broken. so there were two issues involved. one was the embargo had been broken because there had been an announcement and second of all, the embargo was being driven by political considerations and not military ones. he went to the censor. tried to reach the chief censor and went to the operational censor -- first tried to reach the head of all information and couldn't get him on the phone, then went to the censor. the sen sore said, sorry, it's not released, which is what censors do. then he said, i'm going to broadcast -- i'm going to send the story, and the censor shrugged, because there was no way he could send the story, it would be impossible to do that. and off he went. and thought it over and what the censor didn't know is he had access to a military line to london.

and was able to use that line to send -- it was a very sketchy line. it didn't work all that well. the voices faded in and out. he got ahold of london and told them the war had been -- that the surrender had been -- the germans had surrender and told them to send the story to new york, which they did. and so a day earlier than what would have happened otherwise, the united states knew the war was over. the ap's first reaction in -- right afterwards was to be proud of what he had done. but then because of a variety of pressures that came to bear, changes its mind. recalled kennedy. the military in the meanwhile revoked his credentials. in fact, they revoked all of the ap's credentials but that was very short-lived. put they didn't give kennedy back his credentials. they even started a process, started an investigation, and if you go and look at the national archives which we did, wonderful

stuff in there about how they were running around trying to find out how he did it. they couldn't figure out how he got the line. and what is particularly wonderful are the number of journalists who wrote in and said that kennedy should be punished. in fact, by an extraordinary vote, i don't remember the number. 47-2 or something. all the reporters, except for those two, signed a petition condemning what kennedy had done because they didn't like the idea that he had broken the embargo, and, of course, they're sitting there without having the story. "the new york times" reporter drew middleton actually said that it was the biggest, greatest double-cross in the history of journalism. which is an interesting thing for a journalist to say because we all know in journalism school you don't say something is the greatest and biggest or anything else, but he was pretty goddamned mad. so he -- he made this rather hyperbolic statement. tom believes that, in fact, the

"times jirk was clearly one of the more powerful forces moving against kennedy. at any rate, he was brought back to the united states, recalled, and there wasn't a summary execution. he was fired slowly. and essentially disappeared from the ap. he could have, i think is probably fair to say, saved his job if he had recanted. if he had said i really made a mistake and i shouldn't have done it. this he refused to do. and so if you buy the argument that tom and i make which is he did the right thing, we believe it's an act of great journalistic courage, and it also has lessons for today because some of the things that made this particular story possible don't exist. you know. the -- military censors can't control lines the way they used to, for example, because of changes in technology and so forth. but as tom and anybody else who is in journalism knows, the government all the time is trying to withhold information,

oftentimes claiming it's national security when it's really something else. before i turn the table over to tom, i want to say that it is also a great act of courage on his part that the ap has now issued a correction. it would have been very easy not to have ever said anything about this, let the book come out, and not worry about what happened and let it just be an episode that goes down in history as -- you can have various points of view. tom has been a very creative leader at the ap. and one of the things he's done, by the way, is created the archives. anyone who's interested in writing about journalism and journalism history finds that repository of papers which is growing all the time thanks to the very important resource for people who understand what we've been. we all owe a debt to the ap for issuing a correction and for tom

for making sure that happened. >> when i got to ap in 2003 and the vice president of communications, kelly tunny came up and suggested we needed to update the history. the history of ap was last written in 1940. she said the reason it hadn't been updated is because of this incident. i had no knowledge of the incident until that moment. i said why don't we do some reporting and find out what happened and get to the bottom of it and move forward. we can't stop history because we don't like how one story turned out. several times during the process of writing the book i was told, this was really bad and this one wasn't going to go down very well. and i said, would somebody he's get the facts and let's come forward. and so knowing full well in a history that spanned 160 some years that any incident,

including this one, would be all of two paragraphs in the book, and of course it was. and it still didn't seem satisfying. when julia's letter came in and announced that there was a manuscript, that opened another door. and it was pretty clear this was the moment to find out what happened. the only crazy thing that happened along the way is jack had promised julia he would get somebody famous to write the introduction. he clearly failed terribly at this. he came to me and asked if i would be interested and first sized me up to see where i was going to come down in the issue. i was going to come down on what kennedy had done in the reporting, we had done enough of that investigation to know where things stood on that. but i was fascinated to try to figure out what management knew, when it knew it, who was involved, and how it played out. the story turned out to be

chilling, frankly. in every turn. we created a timeline and went back through the facts, the correspondence hour by hour, day by day. and we constructed a case. at no point was ed kennedy ever treated well. it was a great tragedy. he was ap's lead reporter and he was the frontline bureau chief who managed the correspondence across the front as the story moved from north africa, italy, and finally into paris. he was the chosen person to go to witness the signing. there had been a false report of the german surrender a day earlier. and when the word came in, when he got through on the phone to london, the desk held the story for 8 minutes, clearly talked it over. they put his byline out because

his byline added credibility. and in effect told the world, this time the story is true. the war is over. and so it was a compelling story in every aspect of this, and it certainly was compelling to look at it from a management standpoint and to go back through the lessons that could have been learned and should have been learned. it seemed there was only one way to go. mistakes are made, bad mistakes are made. but if you don't learn from them, that's the greatest mistake of all. so it was time to get this out, put it on the table, and move forward. this work, this effort, this collaboration has led to many good things, including the fact that several new developments or several new pieces of information have come forward, even in the last week, as the reports of this book and this

incident have come out. and helpful information and things that we previously didn't know. truth is revealed incrementally. and julia has generously agreed to donate ed's papers to the corporate archives. so we have come, i think, full circle and done the right thing. it's very important for ap to have this case put on the record and finally looked at. and closed in a sense so that we can move forward as we should. >> i wanted to ask you, tom, you are talking about lessons. what are some of the key lessons that ap learned out of this? then what are the lessons for modern day journalism. it seems even with a story, ap had this past week where the government wanted ap to hold on. you were having similar issues with if not censorship, cases of

national security being invoked by the government. >> sure. the security journalism issues are in some ways timeless. this week has been another week where there have been lots of backing and forthing and lots of reports and things that are made up by others and erupt into a public uproar as well. in this case, the facts that are clear, i think one of the things is clearly you look at the facts and you put them in the public and you find out what you did right, what you did wrong, and you go forward. you don't put things in a closet and try to hold them back. the other thing is to understand who's in charge. ap hailed ed kennedy for 36 hours. there was an uproar from the journalism community. the board lead at the time, at the time he was called the

president, went public without talking, we think, to management. he certainly didn't talk to ed kennedy. that knee-jerk reaction lead to a public repudiation of kennedy in the worst possible way. if you look at what the desk did, if you look at what ed kennedy did, there were a lot of lessons that were right. i spent more time as an editor than a reporter. we said good things about editors. they do matter and count for a lot. good editors make a big difference. clearly in this case we had our lead reporter on the story. his name, his background, his scope of coverage experience lent credibility as no other. he thought about it. he never made a knee-jerk reaction. he waited 96 minutes

from the time that the germans' announcements began before he published. he was very thoughtful. he went to the military. he told them the story had to go. even then he went back to his room for 15 minutes. the desk handled it well. i think ed kennedy handled it well. and you trust your reporters. >> i wanted to ask jack a little bit about the theology of all this. in my research i found a "new yorker" article contemporaneous, talking about the controversy and the debate which sounds like it could be something that would be in "the new yorker" in 2012. it says in part, whether a promise extorted as this one was in an airplane several thousand feet up as any moral forces a question for theologians, i suppose kennedy should have refused to promise anything, thus making sure to miss an event no newspaperman in the world would have wanted to miss.

i do not think kennedy imperiled the lives of any as charged. he probably saved the few. in withholding the announcement of an armistice you prolong the shootings. i wanted to see if you could take us back in time, put yourself in ed kennedy's position, sort of talk about the theological arguments of embargoes and the right of the public and the world to know. >> theology is certainly my specialty. i would say -- first of all, i would say you wouldn't see a story like that in "the new yorker" today, because it's like a.j. liebling, there isn't anybody as good as a.j. liebling. >> exactly. >> i think that's a very good way to analyze a key part of this. that's a very weak -- a rather weak story in the paragraph. which is of course the achilles heel in the story.

he gave his pledge he wouldn't publish it, then he broke the pledge. what you have to understand about liebling and kennedy, liebling himself had been a war reporter and had been extremely frustrated by what he had seen. and that article is an expression of the frustration that he was seeing, not just -- kennedy becomes an exemplar of the problem he had been seeing for so long during the war. so he's defending kennedy, as by the way i think he should have, because he thought kennedy was finally resisting what had happened, what the government had been systematically doing, and had become so willing to be compliant, as he put it, that they were constantly saluting, that they had gotten out of the habit for thinking for themselves. the book, the manuscript, that julia's brought forward, her father's book, is