Book Review: Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press, by Julia Kennedy Cochran

Abstract

Julia Kennedy Cochran Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 201 pp.This highly readable and informative memoir by Ed Kennedy, arguably the Associated Press's top foreign correspondent during World War II, spans a decade during which he covered the rise of fascism in Spain and Italy, war in Greece and the Balkans, and foreign affairs in the Middle East and North Africa, before circling back to the conti- nent where he served as the Associated Press's Paris Bureau Chief.As a member of an elite press corps invited to be the first to receive word of Germany's surrender, he hurdled over military censors and other journalists to have the news reported in the United States, defying military orders to wait. Kennedy's dispatch flooded the wires and resulted in bold headlines featuring his byline. Politics won out when Kennedy was stripped of his foreign reporting credentials. A firestorm of protests by jealous colleagues over the scoop, compounded by Kennedy's refusal to apologize for the leak to his boss, led to his firing by the Associated Press.Most of Kennedy's memoir, written just after the World War II but published for the first time in 2012, recounts in still-fresh and illuminating detail the challenges of reporting foreign affairs from three continents, all headed for another world war. The book's first four chapters carry readers through his early years in Paris, Spain, Italy, and the Balkans; chapters 5 through 7 focus on his years in the Middle East and North Africa; and chapters 8 through 10 cover his return to Italy and France. By any mea- sure, Kennedy was deeply informed on European affairs and an expert foreign affairs reporter by the time the United States entered World War II in 1941. By then, he was responsible for all A.P. reporting from the Middle East and North Africa and had been reporting on war in Europe and conflicts in French colonies for half a decade.A central theme of the book is the perpetual struggle Kennedy waged against the blunt instruments of wartime press credentialing, as well as actual and de facto censor- ship. Once the United States entered the war, the military cultivated reporters it could use to raise morale and function as the public relations arm of the war effort. Censorship blunted reports of the staggering consequences of combat and bombing, military blun- ders and atrocities. To a remarkable extent, reporters capitulated to requests to kill unfavorable news and instead write soft stories that did not require a foreign language, knowledge of war, or use of expert sources. …