Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteHow it begins:
"At ten minutes past eleven our Light Cavalry Brigade advanced . . . They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the price and splendour of war . . . ."
How it ends:
"I never thought I'd live to see the day I'd watch a North Vietnamiese platoon . . . in the square in front of the Rex Movie Theatre."
From William Howard Russell's account of the "Charge of the Light Brigade" to the Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett's comment on observing the once unthinkable, The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley's saga of vainglorious thrill seekers, truth benders, sincere (and often frustrated) truth tellers, almost spies, truly spies, propagandists, and civilian and military censors, never lacks for entertainment.
One need not swallow the premise whole, i.e., that the first casualty of war is truth (and that its death is permanent), for after the journalists go the historians, but the accounts of military censorship, the mixed ideals and sympathies of war journalists, the consideration of both the dangers and practical politics of war theaters echo the complaints, and not a little the shananigans, of contemporary journalists in practice from Khabul to Mogadishu.
Because every page of this book sings, I can literally open any and slip into a compelling hook. This is the sort of dangerous stuff Amazon loves--from Knightly's coverage of the reporting of World War I (p. 84):
The government had realised at an early stage that the ideal recruiting ground for propagandists was from among the most powerful newspaper proprietors and editors (although some historians and a few literary men also excelled). The editors of The Times, the Express, the Daily Mail, the Evening Post, and the Chronicle and the managing director of Reuters all did their bit. (Reuters placed its entire resources at the disposal of the Allied cause.)
It gets worse, which in the world of the literati means much, much better.
Knightly's is a devilish history, high recommended.
Knightly, Phillip. The First Casualty. From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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