The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany

Description

In The Price of Truth, Richard Fine recounts the intense drama surrounding the German surrender at the end of WWII and veteran AP journalist Edward Kennedy's controversial scoop. On May 7, 1945, Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender just executed in Reims, France. The practice and public perception of wartime reporting would never be the same. While Allied authorities at the behest of Soviet leaders prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the entire war proved more controversial. The Paris press corps was furious at what it took to be Kennedy's unethical betrayal; military authorities threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. Kennedy defended himself by insisting that the news was being withheld for suspect political reasons unrelated to military security. When the dust settled after prolonged national debate, Kennedy's career was in ruins. The story of Kennedy's surrender dispatch and the meddling by Allied Command, which was already being called a fiasco in May 1945, revises what we know about media-military relations. Discarding "Good War" nostalgia, Fine challenges the accepted view that those relations were amicable during World War II and only later ran off the rails during the Vietnam War. The Price of Truth reveals one of the earliest chapters of tense relations between reporters committed to informing the public and generals tasked with managing a war.