Fine applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Price of Truth recounts the arrival of General Alfred Jodl at Allied headquarters in France and some of his initial interactions with officers of SHAEF, General Dwight Eisenhower’s command, before the German finally surrendered in the early hours of May 7, 1944. As such, this page recounts is a crucial slice of the book’s much longer tick tock of the German surrender story. It does not allude to what is the main focus of the book –not the surrender itself but what happened immediately after, when Associated Press journalist Edward Kennedy (not to be confused with the Massachusetts senator) circumvented military censorship to break the news of the final German surrender he and a small group of other journalists had just witnessed.Learn more about The Price of Truth at the Cornell University Press website.
Kennedy acted after authorities told the press that the story would be held up for at least another day at the behest of their Russian allies. Kennedy insisted that this ban was unrelated to military security and thus illegitimate, and that it was his responsibility to report it to the American people, who had a right to know that the long war in Europe had ended. No action by an American correspondent during the entire war proved more controversial.
Other reporters in Paris accused Kennedy of betrayal; the army threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. When the dust settled after a heated national debate, Kennedy’s estimable career was in ruins. The episode, dramatic in its own right, also revises what we think we know about media-military relations during the Second World War, challenging the conventional view that those relations were amicable at the time and only ran off the rails later in Vietnam.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
