quite a large number of books that are written by war correspondents during that war and some of them are very well-known. this book deserves to be up there with the best of them. there are two reasons for that. one is, it's actually a very good -- a very good expression of what it's like to have been a war correspondent during that time. he was everywhere, as you've pointed out in the beginning. he was in europe even before the war started. he was a hell of a good reporter and given a lot of responsibility. and he was in considerable danger from time to time. and so he had -- he had seen a lot of the war. and he was able to write about it with great humanity. so just as a good story we a war reporter, he did an excellent job. the second part is as you might guess since the date of the story is his being sacked by the ap is he writes consistently throughout the book about the problems he had had. and you can imagine him sitting there in paris.

here's the story. the war is over. and he wants to tell the story. and they won't even let him tell that story. and he is just so damn mad and so fed up he decides he's going to run the story. he's done the right thing. he's checked with the censors. he thinks the grounds for with is there holding the story is incorrect. you can see this is not just an act, one day he was upset. you see years of his being frustrated finally kinding erupting in this volcanic response. not volcanic in the sense it wasn't thought out, but there's a lot behind it. last night when we did this event in new york, somebody on the panel had a very interesting story, which by the way tom and i wish we had had, in which he had gotten in trouble in cairo for resisting the censors. and it caused -- and actually got the story smuggled out or taken the story out by the officers and they had to rewrite the rules. from the beginning of the war,

he had a history of resisting. he'd gotten in trouble because he got to patient ris before the army did. he got ahead of the army, the military was angry he got there first. i think what liebling is expressing, what kennedy was expressing, was months of frustration. >> if i could ask either of you just to talk about some of the early coverage that made his career and then, if it's not too much to ask on the other side, what happened in the post-ap career. >> well, even today there few people in the diplomatic corps or anywhere else who have had the breadth of experience that ed kennedy -- we've talked a little bit about it, but he covered the middle east, he covered the balkans, he was based in cairo, he had enormous war experience.

he got there in i think 1929 and stayed until his pockets went empty and he had to come back to the states. came back again in the '30s. covered the spanish war and right on through. so there were a few people who knew as much, who had experienced as much, and who could report as well. he was the guy and he was on the front line time and time again. i want to point out that his successor, the man who took his place, was a guy named wes gallagher, who was also a predecessor of wine, and wes' son brian is with us tonight. and wes took ed kennedy's place and became general manager. of the associated press. so it's clear, ed was on a track and an incredible track, and he was responsible for some of the most difficult logistics of war coverage. in the aftermath, our understanding is that cooper

helped find ed a job with a publisher who supported ed. ed lived a more quiet life in california, and julia has told us that he did a lot of teaching and did a lot of mentoring. but clearly, he loved europe, he loved the big story, and it was a huge adjustment from what he had done. to go to a small paper. this was a guy who sought out europe and stayed there, came home twice in ten years. so it was a long way from there to santa barbara. >> i was wondering if, when both of you were doing research, if there were any things you discovered, in addition to ed kennedy and the associated press, about the military and political figures that you thought were new or new insights into the political leaders or military leaders of the time.

>> i don't -- i didn't. i think, you know, the -- general allen, who is the -- was the chief information guy, there are lots of people who already thought he wasn't such a great guy before this book came out. i mean, who were journalists. so i don't think -- i think more what you get out of this book is -- what you really get is a sense of what it was really like to do this job. there's some wonderful anecdotes, some wonderful stories. but what you really get is a sense of what it was like to be there every day and to work your way through the war up north, along the coast, eventually up to paris. i say one thing just about this, though. i think there's a lot of work to be done on world war ii and

world war ii coverage. i don't think we still fully have a good way to describe what reporting was like. and frankly, how bad it was. the military had sort of two efforts, two tactics they used to try to control reporters. this may be heresy to many, this may be the ernie pile room. write stories about them so they could be sent home. the stories could be september home and make people feel good about the kids in the trenches. a little of that went a wrong way. but it was also -- it was a good way to build support for the war but it wasn't a particularly good way, generally speaking, to let people know what was really happening in terms of strategy and all of that. the second thing that would happen is giving them opportunities to write first-person stories. it's very interesting in most newspapers you're not supposed to -- at least the way it was when we started out, you weren't supposed to write first person. but because the report reporters

had to find something to write about, in an airplane -- there's a wonderful story we included about a guy, a reporter who got a little bit of stlap nel in his rear end and was very excited, now i've got a story that will be on the front page, he could write about how he got wounded, this is how it feels to be wounded. some of that can be very good. there's one reporter who did a story that everybody should read but is forgotten, jack bellden wrote a story about what it was like to be wounded for "time life." it's truly great reporting. he was also a fabulous reporter, really knew war. it was very hard to company your job, it's very hard to do your job. the reporters on the other side, because they were all patriots, you know, it wasn't the famous story when patton slapped the troop -- the young soldier in the sick bay. in fact, that wasn't reported by a reporter in the field, it was reported here in washington by

somebody, a columnist, who disliked roosevelt and saw it as a way to embarrass roosevelt. so the ap, like everybody else, had problems with this. and i think -- and honestly, i have a great deal of respect for kennedy. he wrote some of these stories too. that's what you had to write if you wanted to write anything that was going to get published. i think there's a lot of work to be done to really chronicle how limited the information we got, to actually be able to show that in some frankly quantitative ways. >> i was wondering if you could talk about what it was like to be a war correspondent, whether it was in the trenches with the troops, whatever you were trying to do, and how life is different now, for better or for worse, for ap's war correspondents. >> well, it's very difficult now, as you know. and times have changed in the sense that the journalist is more the target. and security is a very, very

grave concern. and so i think we've seen an evolution over the last couple of decades to where the journalist is clearly in country after country and place after place being targeted to be taken out. we've had many incidents, we had somebody who suffered a fractured skull last week covering a demonstration, a cameraman. had to have a plate inserted in his head. so the front lines are still the front lines, and i think they are as dicey as they ever have been. and of course now the battle lines are very different. it's less state to state conflict and more guerilla warfare and terrorism acts, so we have moved to a very different and dangerous phase. >> and i wanted to say, if anyone in the audience has any

questions, i want to open it up so you can ask body of these distinguished gentlemen anything you'd like. anyone? >> for either gentleman. would the ap itself be subject to review from the military or if they had stood up for mr. kennedy and instead said as an institution, were they concerned about do you feel as though they were concerned about their own reputation as an institution or was it strictly just a sense that if there is a journalist code about all being on the same page? >> in this case they were certainly subject to a punishment and the credentials for all of ap for a brief period of time were yanked for the european theater, which would have been very disastrous. so that threat was real. and it got -- it seemed to me in this stream of what became the

anti-kennedy story, that became the boat by which management could then drive toward the ownership side of the kennedy position and say, we have to side with management which jumped out in front of attacking kennedy in the name of making sure we have access to that. the credentials were restored very quickly for ap. they were not restored for ed kennedy. ed kennedy also faced -- possibly faced court-martial. the correspondents were given military rank and they were subjected to the military code. so that was another big concern in this case. >> anyone else here? yes. >> -- kennedy notified the london desk the existence of the embargo, that has been one of the criticisms of him all these years, most recently a piece that was moved yesterday in

"huffington post." if you saw that, it was written by the soon of a person that had been the "stars and stripes" correspondent, and in fact had been there prior to kennedy and 16 others. there are some responses to this book and your public apology in that piece that ran yesterday. and there are some valid points in there. one of which is the question of whether, in fact, kennedy sufficiently advised his superiors of the existence of them bar go. >> let me start. >> you start. >> that's an interesting problem. today, if you have a story that is like this, you can actually talk to your editor because of satellite phones. in those days, you couldn't send a cable saying i want to talk to you about a story that i would like to break the embargo on. it's not practical, the censor wouldn't let you send it. the line between london and

paris was not a good line. it wasn't like you could really talk to new york and talk it over with them. now, the argument's been made by somebody last night, actually, that you could have written something at the top that said, this is breaking the imbar go, here's the story. well, that's not a very -- that doesn't tell you very much about why you broke the embargo, and he didn't have very much time to dictate the story because of the quality of the line. so you could -- i guess he could have put something on the top of the story. but you have to understand i think that the communications in those days didn't allow the kind of back and forth with the home office that you would have today. >> let me make a couple of points. first of all, whatever the terms were of the pledge, 18 hours passed. general eisenhower could not even follow the commander in chief's orders in this case. general eisenhower felt the need

to get out the word that the killing should stop. there was no question about the truth of the story. the authenticity of it. the fact that it was an unconditional surrender. the rules of the game changed. but once the story was broken or the embargo was broken and there was repeated broadcasts under many german communications methods, that enabled kennedy to decide that it was time to go forward. kennedy could not call new york without going through the censor. so that route was out. but i think you have to take a step back and look at this culturally. he did what he's done throughout the war. he was the guy who was on point. he operated by himself, got the stories out time and time again.

all true. everybody trusted him. got them to the desk. from the field. and they moved them. also, the people on the desk had expected this story. they knew something was afoot. the rumor had broken the day before, a false story had come out. everybody expected this. so there was great anticipation. the delay and the fact that the allied command couldn't even hold the orders of churchill and truman i think puts this thing in a different perspective. what we're talking about here is a story that was true, and by getting the word out, they were telling people to stop the killing. so the stakes were rather profound. >> do you take any action anybody else involved in this case, anybody on the desk in london or in new york? >> no.

however, i can tell you from the stories inside ap that some people became very pair lighted by it and were upset by it and reacted differently throughout their careers. >> that's london calling. >> i'm afraid it's my desk, but that's the end of that. okay, let's go over here. >> there have been stories from people who were assigned -- great reports have come in, especially in the last week, that so-and-so would not move certain stories of a certain magnitude, that they had to be passed to somebody else to edit and move. somebody was hired in a bureau job, and i won't mention the bureau, and just recounted this incident to the journalist who

started on his first day on the job at ap. so there were stories passed on through decades. and that happens in all journalism institutions and all professions. a lot of the medical profession has an oral culture and we do too. the rules are established in the hallways and you learn the ropes. and these stories were passed on and what happened. and that's why there has been a great outpouring around -- i mean, i've heard from hundreds of people since this story hit the wires. >> first row. >> why did the russians want to delay the announcement for a day? >> because they wanted to get equal credit for winning the war. >> because they wanted to announce it simultaneously, they didn't want it announced only by the french and the british and the americans. they wanted it to be -- they wanted to have time to be part of the announcement and they weren't there in the room when this happened. >> they were. they were at reims.

there was a russian general there. so that's what i don't understand. because the surrender -- >> right, okay. actually, i didn't remember that. but in any event, they didn't -- they weren't ready to make their announcement yet, so they wanted a coordinated announcement. and there had been an agreementment -- a political agreement that they'd ab howed to do that. >> yes. i discussed that issue with ed kennedy. when i was a young man and he was about the most profound individual i knew. he felt, aside from feeling very bitter, he felt that it was entirely a political agreement to allow the soviet union to occupy berlin and to reach the elba. and that was what was supposed to happen during that delay period.

>> the delay was only a day. >> well, everything was moving very fast then, too. and you probably recall that patton was on the other side of the elba just dying to get going. as he was likely to be. >> yes. >> jack and tom, this is great, thank you. fascinating. i'm curious about the german radio broadcasts. i'd love to know more about that. especially the public nature of it. you know, whether it was public, whether it was heard by a large number of people. the reason i'm asking, it seems to me that the embargo here was really broken by a party that was never party to the embargo, by a group -- and certainly by today's standards in journalism, if there was such an embargo like this in place, but the story already entered into the

public realm and it was already out there authoritatively, that this was an official german broadcast. that would be considered by by many news organizations today to in fact break the embargo. the embargo no longer applies because the story's basically out there. and i'm curious to know, was that never -- you know, i realize that there wasn't the instantaneous travel of news then that there is today. but i'm just curious to know about this german radio broadcast because it seems to me that that perhaps -- what the -- the documents you handed out seems like that was one of the motivations of kennedy to feel that he could in fact break the embargo. >> but i would just say one thing. that radio station was party to the embargo because it was controlled by the allies. >> then they were first to break the embargo. well, again, by today's standards, that would be considered by many news organizations the embargo's

broken. >>, argument that was made yesterday by john darton, which is an interesting argument-s that kennedy should have gotten all the reporters together and said this has been broken, we should all report it at the psalm time. and we'll go and tell the censors. and that's one argument. i don't mean to laugh it off. i think it's a thoughtful argument. but there's another way to look at it, which is you're with the a.p. and you're supposed to report news and you've got a first, so you report it. >> let me give some perspective on a related event. wes gallagher has the byline on the d-day invasion story. you can look that up. the original report came from a.p. quoting german radio, that the invasion had begun before the allies authorized the release of the d-day invasion story. this happens all the time. and knowing something like that, as ed kennedy did, i think that

also adds to the cultural aspect that he did what he knew the wire service always does. when an embargo is broken, when the word gets out, and you know it's true, you go. you get the news out of town. >> was he one of the few who knew about this german broadcast? because it seems to me about the other reporters knew that the german broadcast was broken they're good reporters, too, with all due respect to ed. why wouldn't they have said we've got to get this news out as well? >> i think that's one of the points to his credit. he kept doing additional reporting. and that's really one of the reasons to love him even more. here was somebody who didn't stop. he kept on reporting. >> meaning he found out about the broadcast and wasn't just sitting around his hotel room waiting for someone to tell him he could report it. that's what you mean, right? >> right. >> thing else?

yes. >> if i could just add that on the handouts you have we didn't have room to include that there were three broadcasts from flanzburg that kennedy and others heard. and kennedy heard that in the a.p. office. he was listening to the bbc. and these were english translations of the german broadcast that he heard. each broadcast had slightly different content. it was the -- i believe the 2:40 p.m. that put him over and probably decided him to move at that point. the first one came at 2:01. but it was a good 40 minutes of listening to those english translations before he made it -- made a call. and that phone that he picked up

was paris military. and shafe had not thought about closing off that line. but kennedy and other reporters had used that line before. it was not out of the ordinary to pick up that line if you had to call london. >> and may i ask, how long was it before others matched the story and did the other people, once a.p. had the story, then break the embargo or did the military then lift the embargo and let others report the story? >> they did not lift the embargo. and others did not report. >> so it was the next day that -- >> so it was an exclusive for a day. >> most of the reporters spent their time writing a petition. and the biggest party actually occurred on the 7th, according to the liquor bills of the era. not the 8th, as has generally been believed. >> there was also a reference

made earlier to some of the criticism within the journalism community. and i'm security if you could talk about i guess the politics, if you will, of those like "the new york times" and others who may have put some pressure on a.p. what can you share about that? what do you know? how did that come down? >> well, with rare exception everyone was against a.p. for it and very, very angry at a.p. for what happened. but the debate was quickly influenced by the board president, mclean, who went public and attacked kennedy. and so he charted a course. there were a few people who had sided with him, one of whom ultimately gave him a job. but the reality was that this process was aided and abetted by

a -- what i believe was a knee-jerk reaction and clearly an unfair decision that was counter to any journalism principles. the fact that he also was fired was to me beyond outrageous since everybody had anticipated it. the word was coming out that it had been leaked. you never, never fire somebody for a truthful story, either. i mean, i've never seen that happen. so there were a lot of things here that are upsetting. but the tide was cast, and it was pretty ugly. >> -- that spoke to that and urged action by a.p.? from outside news organizations. >> yes. >> yeah. it's not a big secret that the "times" wrote a letter. >> but actually, what's even more interesting is i think kent

cooper, who was then the general manager, which would be tom's job today, which is president and ceo, was saying things like he was going to look at this objectively, but it was impossible to look at it really objectively when the president had already made the statement. and then you find him writing letters that really frankly indicated that he was already sold the guy out and saying -- he made statements that -- we have them in the introduction. i can't quote them to you. but where he was making points that i hope you understand. i hope when you look at all the bad things kennedy did when he's in the military, something like that, i hope you won't -- i hope you'll be objective. and so that -- they clearly -- they clearly got caught in really a bad management spiral. and cooper's -- i mean, tom knows this better than i do. but then at the end cooper never really just finally says you're fired. i mean, actually, ed kennedy never really was told you are

absolutely fired. and so they hoped it would go away. which was -- which is not a good approach. >> which kind of happened for 67 years. >> was there also pressure from the white house or the u.s. government for the a.p. to fire him? >> no. none that we saw. and actually, in the after-action report that the army did, the army showed its enlightened side and ultimately granted him -- re-established his accreditation to cover them anytime in any theater. >> and it was acknowledged that in fact the broadcast in flanzburg had in fact been authorized by the u.s. military, that he was right. >> any final words or thoughts? anyone else? well, i want to thank you very much. this book, if you don't have it, i highly recommend it. very interesting subject.

interesting discussion here. [ applause ] thank you all. >> how do you want to do the signing? if people want to come up? if anyone has the book, then come on up, please do. thank you again. >> this year is the 150th anniversary of the civil war. each weekend american history tv brings you debates and interviews about the events and people who shaped that era. saturdays at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. eastern and sundays at 11:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span 3. find more information about our programs and our other series along with schedules and online video at c-span.org/history. tis