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As it turned out, Speakes simply had not been told the truth by Administration officials. Afterward he complained bitterly to senior White House aides in an interoffice memorandum. If he had known the facts, says Speakes, he could have kept the secret without telling an outright lie. "I could say, I'm sorry, I can't answer that question,' " he explains. "Or, 'I'll check on that.' " Says ABC Paris Bureau Chief Pierre Salinger, a former press secretary who was kept similarly in the dark about the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 by President Kennedy: "You can always make a deal with the press when it knows it is dealing with a national security situation." Argues syndicated Columnist Jody Powell, who was President Carter's press secretary: "The Government has not only the right but sometimes the obligation to lie. If I had been asked hours before an invasion if an invasion was about to take place, I would have denied it and tried to make it a convincing lie."
In the absence of independent reporting from the scene of the battle, and with little detail coming from the Pentagon, reporters did what they could; the television networks used file footage, lively electronic graphics and innumerable maps of Grenada. ABC stood its Pentagon correspondent, Jack Smith, in front of a table model of the island with a pointer to explain what the Pentagon said was happening. On Wednesday, CBS Correspondent Sandy Gilmour chartered a plane in Barbados to capture the first television pictures not supplied by the Government. He taped the naval activity around Grenada from a distance until a U.S. jet fighter cut precariously close to chase his plane off. When the Department of Defense finally provided a short videotape of Cuban weapons caches found in warehouses on Grenada, Cuban prisoners and a few seconds of combat, CBS aired it with a prominent label on-screen reading, "Cleared by Defense Department Censors." At week's end NBC filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Government, demanding the unedited footage that was shot by military photographers.
Even after some reporters were given a limited tour of Grenada by military officials on Thursday, news executives felt that they had got only what one of those reporters, ABC Correspondent Richard Threlkeld, called "a worm's-eye view, just a little segment of what was going on." Journalists who attempted to reach the island on their own by private boat, as TIME's Diederich and his companions had done earlier, were run off by U.S. destroyers and other naval vessels.
Last week's press protests undoubtedly strike some Americans as special pleading. Says the Washington Post's Bradlee: "Their attitude is, 'There you go, bleeding again!' " But any break, even for only a few days' time, in the vital U.S. tradition of reasonably open press coverage during military combat has implications that are exceedingly troubling (see ESSAY). Sums up the U.P.I.'s veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas: "The American people should not have been left in the dark." Indeed, they should never be left in the dark.
— By Janice Castro.
Reported by Patricia Delaney/Washington, with other bureaus