(2 of 3)
Said Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee: "As long as I have been in the business, the press has been on military landings right along with the troops." In fact, starting with the Mexican War in 1846, reporters have taken risks right along with the soldiers. During the years of war in Southeast Asia, more than 50 were killed. To suggest that the press was kept out for its own good, said an incensed CBS News President Ed Joyce, "is an insult to the men and women who died covering wars." On its editorial page on Friday, the New York Times referred to the photograph that shows the first American Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima. Wrote the Times: "How much safety does he [Weinberger] think was guaranteed to Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, who took the famous picture?"
There are more dangerous places than Grenada these days, including El Salvador and Lebanon, where reporters are reasonably free to go wherever they choose. But the safety of journalists may not have been the primary concern of Defense officials. "We learned a lesson in the Falklands," one U.S. lieutenant colonel candidly told an American reporter. The officer was referring to the Thatcher government's severe restrictions on British journalists covering the Falklands conflict last year. British reporters were required to agree in advance to heavy censorship, and no live television pictures were transmitted from the battle zone. Nevertheless, they were allowed to accompany the task force and go in with the first troops. Says ABC News Vice President David Burke: "And they don't even have a First Amendment!"
U.S. journalists do. In practice, however, U.S. combat reporters have always agreed to sensible limits on what they report, especially in situations where dispatches could conceivably endanger the lives of U.S. fighting men. American reporters have often accompanied troops to battle under restrictions. When President Johnson sent the Marines to Santo Domingo in 1965, no journalist broke the embargo placed on the prebattle confidential briefings that the President provided. During the Viet Nam War, reporters were allowed to go along on nearly all missions. When U.S. soldiers secretly crossed the border into Cambodia in 1970, General Creighton Abrams lent his personal aircraft to reporters, and trusted them to hold their stories until the action was well under way.
That spirit of trust and cooperation between press and government was absent right from the start of the week's dramatic events. When CBS Correspondent Bill Plante asked White House Press Spokesman Larry Speakes on Monday afternoon whether an invasion was imminent, Speakes checked and came back with the reply: "Preposterous!"