In May, 1945, and for several months thereafter, Edward Kennedy was the most famous reporter in the world for breaking the exclusive story of Germany’s World War II surrender.
For successfully challenging a politically inspired embargo and reporting one of the most important news stories of the 20th century, Kennedy lost his accreditation as a war correspondent, the esteem of his reportorial competitors and his job as Associated Press bureau chief for the Europe.
He never returned international reporting, a field in which he had become an acknowledged master after nearly two decades of front line war reporting.
Kennedy spent the rest of his life editing two small town newspapers: three years as managing editor of the Santa Barbara News Press and the remainder of his life as managing editor and assistant publisher of the Monterey Peninsula Herald. Kennedy died on Nov. 29, 1963, after being struck by a car while walking in downtown Monterey. He was 58.
By Eric Brazil
The biggest scoop scored by any reporter during World War II also brought on the war’s most profound debate on journalistic ethics, one centered on censorship.
Edward Kennedy, European bureau chief for the Associated Press, filed an exclusive report of Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945, 24 hours before his competitors. His story touched off worldwide celebration – and fierce controversy.
Kennedy challenged censorship by breaking a military embargo imposed on war correspondents that forbid them to report one of the 20th century’s most important stories for a full day. In doing so, he faced a journalistic dilemma: what is the ethical and professional obligation of a reporter confronted with a vitally important story that could ruin his or her career and possibly imperil national security if published?
Kennedy’s answer was unequivocal. Alone among several hundred accredited war correspondents in Europe, he recognized the difference between legitimate military censorship and political expedience. He had the nerve and confidence to defeat censorship and report the news, then braced himself for the consequences. “I will fight political censorship wherever I find it … It has been freely admitted no military security was involved here,” he later said.
Read about the campaign to win a Pulitzer Prize for Ed Kennedy.
Kennedy acknowledged that breaking the embargo “would cause a storm,” and it did. Even as the global celebration continued, adverse reaction set in, and Kennedy became the cynosure of criticism.
The military, taken by surprise, was angry and embarrassed. Premature disclosure of the surrender wrecked “Operation Jackplane,” the 24-page protocol developed by the military to deal with “a news event of transcendent importance,” such as the surrender. Hours after Kennedy filed his story, the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) revoked his war correspondent credential and ordered him back to the United States.
AP refused to defend Kennedy, repudiating him publicly, consigning him to journalistic limbo for months and finally terminating him. Then-AP President Robert McLean apologized, expressing “profound regret” for the incident. Other critics insisted that permitting individual reporters to decide what constitutes military security betrayed a public trust that threatened to unravel the structure of American journalism.
Fifty-two of Kennedy’s fellow war correspondents, howling mad because they had been beaten on the most important story of their careers, wrote SHAEF a letter calling Kennedy’s action “the most disgraceful, deliberate and unethical double-cross in the history of journalism.”
(The New York Times exemplified the quandary that Kennedy had created for journalism by his intrepid reporting. It published Kennedy’s story of the surrender with his by line under an eight column, four deck headline that dominated its front page on May 8, 1945. The next day the Times editorialized that Kennedy had committed “a grave disservice to the newspaper profession.”)
Nevertheless, the brute fact is that Kennedy’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of political censorship in wartime and break the embargo brought relief and jubilation throughout a world exhausted by war, waiting and hoping for the end as loved ones on the front remained in harm’s way while it ground down.
Despite the pummeling his reputation took during his lifetime, history has vindicated Ed Kennedy.
A year after the revocation of Kennedy’s press credential, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, SHAEF’s supreme commander, tacitly conceding that the facts were on Kennedy’s side, quietly restored his eligibility to apply for reaccreditation. But Ike’s action did little to end the controversy.
It took an AP apology more than half a century later, on April 20, 2012, with Kennedy long dead, for the definitive validation of his decision to challenge political censorship and report the news.
“Kennedy did everything right,” said then-president and CEO Tom Curley. “Once the war is over, you can’t hold back information like that. The world needed to know.” Failure to support Kennedy in 1945 “was a terrible day for the AP,” he said.
Kennedy was among the most experienced and respected American war correspondents in Europe, having covered the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, unrest in Greece and ethnic feuds 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.
Kennedy was one of 17 reporters representing major print and broadcast associations picked by SHAEF to witness the signing of Germany’s unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. All had been pledged to secrecy until the military cleared the news for release.
While reporters had been told that Gen. Eisenhower wanted the surrender news released immediately, they learned from Brig. Gen. Frank Allen, SHAEF’s publicity chief , that Ike’s “hands were tied at a high political level” and that an embargo extending until 3 p.m. May 8 was being imposed on reporting the most important event of World War II.
“To me, that meant just one thing – that this was not military but political censorship,” Kennedy wrote in his posthumously published memoir. “The absurdity of attempting to bottle up news of such magnitude was too apparent. I knew from experience that one might as well try to censor the rising of the sun.”
Upon returning to Paris from Reims, Kennedy learned that the military had in fact broken its own embargo on the German surrender news. It was being broadcast from German headquarters from the border town of Flensburg, to the German people, by Count Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk, foreign minister in the regime of Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s successor. He assumed that the transmission could not have been made absent authorization by the Allied military, an assumption later confirmed by Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, former SHAEF chief of staff.
Kennedy confronted the chief military censor with his discovery and announced his intention to file the story, which, under the accepted rules of western journalism, was fair game because the broadcast technically broke the embargo. The censor dismissed his announced intention as rhetorical posturing.
Using a phone not connected to the military censorship network, Kennedy contacted AP’s London bureau and dictated his story, dateline, Rheims. It moved on the wire one hour and 54 minutes after the Flensburg broadcast and headlined every newspaper and led every radio broadcast in the Allied world the next day. Kennedy’s story remained exclusive for a full day, because military censors prohibited other accredited correspondents from filing their own stories until the embargo elapsed.
Back in the states, Kennedy was alternately lionized and demonized. He wrote a defense of his action “I’d Do It Again,” for the Atlantic Monthly and a memoir of his life as a war correspondent, for which he could find no publisher. (That memoir, “Ed Kennedy’s War,” resurrected by his daughter Julia Kennedy Cochran, was published by Louisiana State University in 2012.)
By then, it had long since become clear that the embargo was the brainchild of President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had agreed to announce Germany’s surrender simultaneously with the Soviet Union, which was scheduled the next day in Berlin. In imposing he embargo, Eisenhower, SHEAF’s supreme commander, was simply delivering a message from higher authority.
Eisenhower, who regarded accredited war correspondents as “quasi officers” under his command, was furious at the breaking of the embargo and thought Kennedy should face court martial. Brig. Gen. Edward Betts, Judge Advocate General for the European theatre talked him out of it, arguing that a trial would be bitterly fought and highly publicized and that no possible good could ensue to the armed forces even if the army won the case.
(Note: When the controversy over Kennedy’s scoop was at its height, Gen. Allen contended that the embargo was in fact imposed for reasons of military security. If the surrender were to be announced solely by the Allies, he said, Eisenhower would be placed “in the position of having broken an understanding with our Russian allies … He feared that the entire chain of negotiations, involving an agreed upon later meeting between the German, Russian and Allied high commands might break down, therefore prolonging the war. Had this occurred, the results would have been deplorable.” That defense of the embargo was never mentioned again.)
In a 1948 retrospective published in the San Francisco Call Bulletin, Lt. Col. Thor W. Smith, one of three officers picked to investigate the Kennedy case, wrote that “one basic fact which has never been emphasized adequately is that the Chiefs of State … the Big Three … had the fallacious notion, from which no one could shake them, that news about the end of a World War could be embargoed until they chose to announce it officially and simultaneously … Both before and after the surrender signing, every public relations officer concerned … protested strenuously against such a fantastic embargo of world shaking news.”
Smith also observed that “as time goes by, Kennedy’s main defensive argument gets better and better. He puts the onus for delay on Stalin, where, in all probability, it actually lay.”
Although Kennedy never doubted that he had exercised the First Amendment rights accorded American reporters that he had done the ethical thing, his old friend Wes Gallagher, former president of AP, said he was deeply scarred by the incident. “He became a sad and dispirited man after World War II, always seeking to justify his actions,” Gallagher said.
Speaking to the Texas Press Association in 1947, Kennedy elaborated on the political dimension of the decision by Truman and Churchill to accede to Stalin’s demand for a simultaneous announcement of the surrender. “Russia was fully represented at Reims by Gen. Susloparov, as plenipotentiary for Stalin, who formally signed Russia’s acceptance of Germany’s surrender there. The Berlin ceremony was wholly meaningless, except for propaganda purposes,” he said, and it was the beginning of the Cold War. “The Russian move was designed to make the Russian people … believe that Russia had defeated Germany, with slight aid from the Western powers,” he said.
In his best-selling post-war memoir “Crusade in Europe,” Eisenhower made it clear that he had recovered from his anger that Kennedy’s journalistic enterprise triggered. “One American reporter published the (surrender) story before the release hour, which infuriated other newsmen who kept the faith,” he wrote. “The incident created considerable furor, but in the outcome no real harm was done, except to other publications.”
Kennedy was killed in 1963 at age 58, struck by a car while crossing a a street in downtown Monterey, CA, where he had been editor and assistant publisher of the Monterey Peninsula Herald since 1949. He is memorialized by a plaque in Laguna Grande Park in the nearby city of Seaside. It bears the inscription “He gave the world 24 hours more of happiness.”
Eric Brazil is a retired newspaperman who spent a half century covering and editing the news as a reporter for San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, Los Angeles bureau chief for USA Today, Sacramento bureau chief for Gannett News Service and city editor and reporter for the Salinas Californian. He is a graduate of Stanford University and a resident of Sacramento.