Air University Review, May-June 1976

The title of Phillip Knightley’s recent book, The First Casualty,* comes from Senator Hiram Johnson's 1917 remark: "The first casualty when war comes is truth." Frankly, benumbed as they are by the Watergate-CIA-FBI revelations, many Americans may feel that war is being unfairly singled out here. On almost a daily basis, our citizens are now discovering how variable an entity truth is and how useless sophistry is in defending its variations.

*Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, $12.95), 465 pages.

As Mr. Knightley convincingly shows, the United States is not alone in its wartime censorship, with its denials and distortions of the truth. It is probably accurate to say that all nations share this culpability to some degree. Yet this knowledge offers Americans no real comfort. Judgments made concerning national ethics seem indissolubly tied to the ethical contract between the citizen and the state. Here in the United States that contract finds major support in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The first of these guarantees the freedom of the press. And that guarantee stands apart, without any blanket wartime proviso which would nullify that freedom in the presence of "national security" or cause it to self-destruct at the sound of hostile fire. Nor is there anything likely to be found in related writings that obligates the press in wartime to roll over and await instructions at the first solemn whisper of "national security"

Not that passivity is a particular characteristic of war correspondents. Being composites, like the rest of us in other professions, they are active and lazy, liberal and conservative, reactionary and innovative, bold and cowardly. They also are inspired by patriotism and hemmed in by the restrictions of centralized communications and the constant threat of expulsion from the war zone. Yet, all that said, one reads The First Casualty and comes away with an ill-defined feeling that these unique men did not fight fiercely enough against the censorship of their efforts to bring the truth to the people.

Sometimes surprisingly quick to subordinate the role of the press to the role of the government in wartime, the correspondents might all recall with profit Jefferson's remarks about the press: " 

…and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Knightley cites Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain, in what seems to be a flagrant abdication of responsibility, as saying in 1917 about World War I: "If people really knew, [this] war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course, they don't know and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship would not pass the truth." What exactly it is that the people ". . . don't know and can't know" is not spelled out. Retrospectively, however, one can speculate that it might have been the political mindlessness after Sarajevo that found one nation after another following almost blindly and stumbling into the abyss of World War I; or it might have been an exposure of the arid military imaginations on both sides of the conflict--imaginations strategically and tactically so inflexible that they would literally cripple an entire European generation.

As we know, the propagandists of the West were exceptionally successful in World War I--the people were not allowed to know--and the war continued for more than a year following the above-quoted remarks of Lloyd George. Today's world may be better off through the resultant delay of the eventual armistice; perhaps faithful adherence to "national security" did serve mankind well. The answer to this should probably be left to historians, political scientists, and governmental leaders. The layman, though, can speculate that the pressures of a war-weary, enlightened electorate might have produced better results than what did occur. The layman can also legitimately puzzle over the Catch-22 nature of wars fought to "make the world safe for democracy" that at the same time deny the democracy the chance to talk about fighting, safety, or democracy.

Himself a correspondent, Mr. Knightley writes with skill and insight about the wonders and the warts of the fourth estate. He writes with sensitivity about many of the moral questions reporters must deal with; about those reporters who regard war as fun; and about those who eventually stagger away disillusioned by the inhumanity of man. He has Drew Middleton of the New York Times noting that a correspondent's basic responsibility is ". . . to get the facts and write them with his interpretation of what they mean to the war .…" And he presents an alternative approach by citing Herb Matthews: "I would always opt for open, honest bias. A newspaperman should work with his heart as well as his mind."

Somehow, though, these stark statements of philosophy do not seem adequate. What does it matter if Middleton is correct, or Matthews, if the essence of what they are writing does not get to the reader because of censorship? Perhaps the memory of Watergate and the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein is still too vivid to accept reportorial diligence that does not focus with equal intensity on the twin goals of getting the story and getting it to the public. And perhaps the refusal of the publishers of the New York Times to knuckle under to an irritated JFK and withdraw David Halberstam from Vietnam is still too recent a reminder that neither patriotic reporters nor patriotic publisher need give in automatically to governmental pressures.

None of this is meant to suggest that The First Casualty doesn't treat the issue of governmental censorship. It does, and well. However, the book also discusses reporters from many countries involved in many wars. Accordingly, it is likely to cause exclusively national issues to flare up--issues that were placed on the back burner during hostilities but which need to be discussed in a time of postwar calm.

Certainly, this is a "big" book. It sweeps across the landscape of Western war from Crimea to Vietnam at a pace swift enough to sustain interest but not so rapidly that events are fragmented beyond recognition.

It has a cast of thousands, and its main characters--the Burchetts, the Murrows, the Pyles, the Halberstams, et al.--have been household names. It is easy reading and caters to appetites as diverse as adventure, history, and war. In his devotion to "the whole truth," the author will shock the average reader in at least one passage: "The Americans mutilated bodies. One wants the hearts cut out of the dead Vietcong to feed his dog . . . skulls were a favorite, and [one well-known colonel] carried one about at his farewell party."

The student of history will find The First Casualty a valuable adjunct to his text, since it adds to the dimension of viewpoint. The evacuation of Dunkirk, for example, has assumed almost mythical status in some circles. Here the author has General Sir Harold E. Franklyn, a division-commander at Dunkirk, saying ". . . that the evacuation has been over-glamourized and that reports of merciless bombing and the hell of Dunkirk were quite ridiculous." In the same spirit Liddell Hart points out that" . . .  the German breakthrough that led up to Dunkir . . . was actually achieved with armies inferior in numbers to those opposing them. . . . "

The First Casualty also has a nice touch in debunking legends. Hemingway would be furious were he able to read Knightley's assessment of his reportorial performance in Civil War Spain:

….his performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad. On a technical level, his descriptions of battle and bombardments are monotonous; his emphasis on his own close location to the action smacks of boastfulness; his accounts of blood, wounds, and severed legs are typical of his desire to shock…..

There are. numerous bonuses like this throughout the book. They spice it up and make it swifter reading. But they hardly constitute the most memorable element of The First Casualty. That consists, instead, in the reminder the book provides that the fight for individual freedom need not be an international fight, or even one against an avowed enemy, and that the best ally the citizen can have is a free press possessing the will to fight for that freedom. As to whether we Americans should get the unfiltered truth or that which drips down slowly and erratically through the bureaucracy, Patrick Henry's confident remark has a wonderfully fundamental sound: "For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it."