Ed Kennedy's War

V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press

Ed Kennedy, Julia Kennedy Cochran, Julia Kennedy Cochran

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807145272
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

On May 7, 1945, Associated Press reporter Ed Kennedy became the most famous -- or infamous -- American correspondent of World War II. On that day in France, General Alfred Jodl signed the official documents as the Germans surrendered to the Allies. Army officials allowed a select number of reporters, including Kennedy, to witness this historic moment -- but then instructed the journalists that the story was under military embargo. In a courageous but costly move, Kennedy defied the military embargo and broke the news of the Allied victory. His scoop generated instant controversy. Rival news organizations angrily protested, and the AP fired him several months after the war ended.
In this absorbing and previously unpublished personal account, Kennedy recounts his career as a newspaperman from his early days as a stringer in Paris to the aftermath of his dismissal from the AP. During his time as a foreign correspondent, he covered the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, unrest in Greece, and ethnic feuding in the Balkans. During World War II, he reported from Greece, Italy, North Africa, and the Middle East before heading back to France to cover its liberation and the German surrender negotiations. His decision to break the news of V-E Day made him front-page headlines in the New York Times. In his narrative, Kennedy emerges both as a reporter with an eye for a good story and an unwavering foe of censorship.
This edition includes an introduction by Tom Curley and John Maxwell Hamilton, as well as a prologue and epilogue by Kennedy's daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran. Their work draws upon newly available records held in the Associated Press Corporate Archives.

Chapter 1

PARIS

SEPTEMBER 3, 1935, WOULD SERVE AS WELL AS ANY DATE TO MARK the beginning of the prewar period, the start of the buildup for World War II. The postwar era ended in the middle twenties, when the last patch was put on the physical wreckage of World War I. An interlude of precious calm, highlighted by the Truce of Locarno, followed.¹ But the fabric of peace was too delicate to withstand the world depression which began in America in 1929, and from 1931 the European situation deteriorated. Nineteen thirty-three put Adolf Hitler in power, and in 1934 there were rumblings of what was to come. Treaties were repudiated and defiance was barked, but as yet there was no overt act to break the peace.

September 3 was not a day of great news, but it was the day I arrived in Paris to join the staff of the Associated Press there. I stepped out of the Gare St. Lazare onto streets bathed in feeble sunshine but still glistening from a shower. This is the time when postcard photographers must be busy in Paris, for the postcard makers like to show buildings in the sunlight with their reflections on wet pavements.

Paris was not new to me. I had lived there in 1927 as a student and again in 1931 as a member of the staff of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. I had not found much time for study during my first visit, at least for study out of books. Nineteen twenty-seven was the best year France enjoyed between the two wars. Paris was bubbling over with exciting things, living was cheap, and I was twenty-one. But even in that happy year some older Frenchmen told me it was too bad I had not known Paris before the war—ah, in those days, Paris was really quelque chose.

My “student days” in Paris ended when my money ran out, a little ahead of time. I returned home and spent three years on the staffs of newspapers, on the Newark Star-Eagle, the New York Sun, and the Washington Star. Those were days of police blotters and murder trials, and I enjoyed them. A little startled to find myself a few hundred dollars to the good in 1931, I left abruptly for a second fling in France.

There were two havens for American newspapermen in Paris—the Herald and the Tribune, and the Tribune was the lesser haven. Their pay scales were low, the Tribune’s lower than the Herald’s, and their turnover was rapid; in the twenties almost anyone who could read English (and a few who couldn’t) could land a job at one of them. But by 1931 the depression had hit France and especially the tourist business, and these papers were published mainly for American tourists. I made frequent and unsuccessful visits to both, and to all the American news bureaus. Before long, my money was gone and I was experiencing something new—hunger. It was not, of course, the long-term hunger that I was to see among others later but merely the sensation of walking about on an empty stomach and frequenting places where an invitation to dinner from a fellow American might be received. I did not confide my condition to anyone, but I was deeply impressed by the changed outlook on life which hunger brings. I had established uneasy credit for my room in a shabby hotel on the Île St. Louis, and I somehow ran into a meal almost every day. Finally, an American girl, sensing my situation, advanced me a loan, which lasted me until a job opened at the Tribune.

The Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune had been established during the war as a service to American soldiers. It remained in the field as a weak competitor of the Herald, founded well before the turn of the century by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., as the European edition of his New York Herald. The Tribune’s circulation was a secret, but we guessed it to be about 20,000, partly free distribution by hotels to their American guests. It was published in a triangular agglomeration of buildings having floors at varying levels and with rooms and sections linked by a maze of hallways, stairways, and doorways. The layout had changed with the needs of tenants; here doorways were sealed, there new ones had been cut through. In the interior there was a courtyard. The labyrinth housed the plants of several newspapers using a common press at assigned hours, shops, wholesale and manufacturing establishments, apartments, and a girls’ school.

The assortment of newspapermen that put out the Tribune was as strangely matched as its building. Half had never worked on a news paper at home but drifted into newspaper work abroad. One, affectionately known as “Doc,” gave treatments for gonorrhea. Another augmented his journalistic stipend by steering American tourists to selected brothels on a commission basis and got room and board at one of the establishments. And there were some whose conduct was as circumspect as it would have been in a small town in Iowa.

I received six hundred francs a week (then $24) from the Tribune, which was one-third of what I had earned at home. The paper could get all the American newspapermen it wanted at that wage; there was a never-ending supply of new arrivals who were glad to take any salary for the privilege of living and working in Paris. We were paid twice monthly, but one could draw advances against payday at a usurious interest rate. The interest, we were told, went to an employees’ welfare fund, but we never heard of anyone who benefitted from it.

The Tribune had night and day staffs, operating quite separately. The day staff covered such news as was of special interest to Americans in Europe. The night staff, ensconced around a big table, converted cabled briefs of news from home and clippings from French newspapers into material for the paper. On writing a story, a man tossed it to his neighbor for copy-reading and a headline. This system of mutual copy-reading was a guarantee of tolerant treatment, for mutilation of the fine prose output of any man could bring a reprisal when he took over his copy-reader’s copy. A maximum of liberty was permitted—encouraged, in fact—in the rewriting of cabled dispatches, necessarily brief because of the tolls. A man might be asked to render a ten-word bulletin from Washington into half a column. To do this he needed only to draw liberally on his background of the subject and perhaps supply a few suitable direct quotes. Usually the confected product turned out to be just about what happened. If not, there was seldom any complaint.

The two members of the Tribune staff whom I came to know best were Wilfred Barbour and Madison Kirby. Barbour’s outlook was gloomy. The depression had come to stay, the days of Americans in Europe were over, the Tribune would fold, it was doubtful that Paris could support even one American paper. Changes in the international situation were to him simply different degrees of darkness. He saw no hope for Europe, little for America, and not very much for the human race. Four years later, as many of his glum predictions were coming true, Barbour was in Ethiopia as a member of the Chicago Tribune’s foreign staff. In quest of first-hand information, he went into a disease-ridden area which foreigners had been advised to avoid and died there of fever.

The Tribune’s editorial room was on the third floor, with two large windows looking out on the courtyard. The windows were separated by six feet of wall. Kirby had a trick of walking out one of the windows. He appeared to step into space. Anyone seeing the performance for the first time usually gasped and expected to hear him crash on the pavement below. But Kirby, with the agility of an acrobat, clung to a ledge, made his way along the outer wall to the other window and nonchalantly walked in. A few months after returning to America, I picked up a newspaper and read a short dispatch from Paris that Kirby had been killed in a fall from a third-story window. That was all it said, but I didn’t need any details.

I had heard Kirby mention a French girlfriend whom he called Horse-face. Some five years after his death, I was talking to a girl in Paris. On learning that I was a newspaperman, she said, “I once knew an American journalist. Ah, what a marvelous fellow! His name was Madison Kirby.”

I looked at her elongated visage and said, “Then you must be Horseface.”

“Ah,” she cried with delight. “So he told you about me. Oui, Orseface, c’est moi!”

* * *

The Paris to which I returned in 1935 was less gay than that of 1927 and more sober than that of 1931. The Associated Press office was on the fifth floor of a building on Rue Vivienne, off the Place de la Bourse. John Evans headed the staff. The other members were Richard G. Massock, Robert B. Parker, Charles Foltz, and Adelaide Kerr, who wrote about fashions. Henry Cassidy, later of Moscow fame, joined us about six months after my arrival. Evans was inclined to be fussy over trivialities, such as undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s. His theory was that if you taught a reporter to be careful and reliable in small matters, it would become a habit and he would be careful and reliable in big matters. I did not agree with him at the time—none of us did—but it probably was good training.

Not long after my arrival, there was a minor tragedy in the office. Moroney was fired. Moroney was an Englishman of considerable culture who had been with the Associated Press for thirty years. He could hardly be described as an alert and zealous reporter, since he harbored a deep conviction that all the worthwhile stories had already been written. Let any member of the staff get enthusiastic about something he was writing and Moroney would say: “I wrote the same thing in 1904. Sykes did a splendid job on it in 1911. I batted it out again in 1924. There’s really nothing new in it, you know. If I were you, my boy, I’d forget the whole thing. It’s been written already.”

The staff worked around the clock. There was no key to the office; it had been lost years ago and nobody had missed it. The least desirable shift was the “early,” when a man held the fort from midnight until 8:30 in the morning. Moroney liked these hours; they enabled him to get away from the turmoil of the day, to think without distractions. He would survey the situation through the thirty morning papers of Paris and invariably come to the conclusion that tension in Europe had lessened, that the outlook was brighter. He got that cheery note into his dispatch each morning for the early editions of afternoon papers in America.

By mid-morning, Evans, with our assistance, would usually have ferreted out some disturbing factor to provide a “new lead”—and justify a bigger headline—for the Paris story. This continued through the day, and by nightfall the war clouds again would be gathering in Europe, according to the Associated Press. European correspondents of the period frequently were denounced as warmongers and sometimes blamed for keeping the Continent disturbed. It is true that some irresponsible dispatches from Europe were published in America, but by and large the press accounts of happenings there merely reflected the jitters of a Continent torn by dissension and moving inevitably toward a new collision.

Moroney, at fifty-seven, had wearied of political crises and threats of war. His real interest was his little home in a sleepy village on the Marne, twenty miles east of Paris. He was awaiting retirement and had based all his plans on being eligible for a pension at sixty. But the Associated Press foreign staff had little use for a man who had lost interest in news, so Moroney had to go, and without a pension. I succeeded him on the “early” shift. I was the watchdog of American newspaper readers in the French capital during those hours, with a teletype at my side to alert them if anything untoward occurred. My main task was to pore through the morning papers, and the multiplicity of Paris newspapers being what it was, that alone was practically a day’s work. The job gave me little opportunity to show what I could do as a reporter, but it gave me time to study the newspapers with care and learn what each stood for and what interest was behind it. It also enabled me to review the events of the preceding day and try to make a sound appraisal of the course of events.

* * *

Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was the big news of the autumn of 1935. Here was the last chance of the League of Nations to save its system. A combined fleet of the League members placed before the Suez Canal could have stopped Mussolini, but it would have meant war, or so the British and French people thought. Who wanted to die for the Negus?² The pitiful military weakness of Italy which World War II disclosed makes Mussolini’s bluff of 1935 all the grander. In the spring came Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland. As British statesmen distinguished finely and learnedly between an overt aggression and a mere violation of League law inside one’s country, Parisians simply said the situation was bad but they didn’t want to go to war about it.

An election took France further to the left than at any time since the Commune of Paris of 1871.³ It put in power Léon Blum and his People’s Front, with an ambitious program of social reforms.⁴ The Rightists applied themselves to an equally ambitious program of sabotage. The introduction of the forty-hour week in France was hailed as a big gain for the workers, but it was not adequately backed up by technological advances to permit reduction of working hours without impairing production. Across the frontier, German workers were putting in fifty-two hours a week. When the Spanish Civil War started in July 1936, the People’s Front Regime showed itself no more capable of appreciating and facing the true situation of Europe than its predecessors.

It was evident even to so unqualified an observer as myself that something was very wrong with France. I suspected that the decay shown in the disintegration of the parliamentary system and in the lack of direction of intellectuals ran deep into the French people. Some French friends reassured me. “Oh, France is like that,” they said. “It is better for us to have our Republic and our crises. They don’t mean anything. We are a revolutionary people and we need frequent falls of the government to satisfy us. Even the sit-down strikes do not mean much. Just workers taking a rest. France, after all, is a rich country, almost self-supporting in food and with an empire to draw from. We can afford the luxury of a little turmoil. We’ll pull through.” France might have pulled through had France not been in Europe.

Life was pleasant in Paris in that period, at least for me and most of my acquaintances. In an attempt to improve my French, I placed an advertisement in L’Intransigeant offering to exchange French-English conversation. Most of the replies were serious, although there was one that said: “Je suis blonde, mince, and j’ai vingt-quartre ans. Je ne demand pas le marriage, Monsieur. . . .”⁵ I made the acquaintance of several earnest young men and women of various classes in the venture and learned a little about the French people. I often found that the celebrated French thrift was mostly avarice and the equally celebrated French logic was sometimes nonsense, but there was a joy and ease and feeling of freedom in Paris which I have seldom encountered elsewhere. I have never had sympathy with Americans who said they loved France but disliked the French. France was what the French had made it.

* * *

The 1914–18 conflict was not war and revolution; it was only war. It left millions dead and impoverished a continent, but it had solved nothing. The European situation was basically the same as before we intervened, except that the sting of defeat and the imposition of terms which the vanquished felt unjust—and all the more unjust for our interference—left a deep resentment, a sense of frustration and hatred which were bound to lead to action as soon as circumstances permitted. To the conquered, escape from the terms of Versailles not only meant throwing off shackles—it meant honor and justice. In short, World War I did not lead to internationalism, but gave new stimulus to the nationalism which had been developing in Europe for more than a century. This nationalism was heady stuff, and democracy only increased its use. The greater the participation of the masses in world affairs, the more of it was drunk. It was as opposite and contradictory to any new era of internationalism as a gin binge is to teetotalism.

The Treaty of Versailles left Europe festering with sores.⁶ The worst of these was the dispute over the Polish Corridor, and as it happened, Germany’s eventual resort to arms to resolve this question was the immediate cause of World War II.⁷ The Poles and Germans had fought over the territory for eight hundred years. Both had plausible historical and ethnic title to it. To the Germans, its cession to the Poles without even a plebiscite was as unconscionable as a Canadian corridor down the Hudson Valley to the sea would be to us. To the Poles, its return to Germany was viewed as we would view a return of California to Mexico. To the Germans, it was a barrier against their expansion eastward almost as unreasonable as the wall the French might have raised against the move of our pioneers westward had they retained the Louisiana Territory. To the Poles, its return meant not only the loss of a big part of their country’s choicest land and the consignment of one-tenth of the Polish people to German slavery but the first step in a new partition of Poland.

Consider Transylvania, ceded to Rumania in the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This fertile region had no majority, but Rumanian, Hungarian, and German minorities. Under a system in which these peoples were primarily regarded—and regarded themselves—as human beings with a common interest in the welfare of their territory rather than as three separate peoples, permanent tranquility might be achieved. But such a system was not permitted to prevail between the two wars.

These and many other sores emphasize the basic insolubility of Europe’s problems of the interbellum era. To the Poles, the idea of self-determination meant the Corridor. To the Germans, it also meant the Corridor. To the Hungarians, it meant their God-given right to the Realm of St. Stephen. And to a Transylvanian, what it meant depended on whether he was a German, Magyar, or Rumanian Transylvanian. So often the issue was not so much right versus wrong, but right versus right. The history of the period at least demonstrates that the ills of Europe cannot be cured by palliatives or makeshift medicine. The Germans of 1914 had a drastic treatment. Dr. Hitler showed up twenty years later with a remedy worse than the disease. Now the Russians have a plan. . . .

Unlovely as history may judge the period between the two wars, it had its beauty and its brilliance. Almost forgotten now is the shining skill with which French statesmen—notably Poincaré, Paul-Boncour, and Briand—reestablished the prestige and influence of their country in Europe.⁸ The French virtually kidnapped the League of Nations, achieved an elaborate array of alliances, and imposed on Europe a peculiarly French system of ordre. France would have nothing of British experiments in the direction of trusting Ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Paris
• 2. Spain
• 3. Italy
• 4. Balkan Interlude
• 5. The Middle East
• 6. Off for Tripoli
• 7. North Africa
• 8. Return to Italy
• 9. Return to France
• 10. Operation Jackplane
• 11. Homecoming
• 12. Westward Ho!
• Epilogue
• Illustrations