Facts, Censorship, and Spin: Covering the Pacific War from Australia, 1942

We’re always very glad whenever we go to have a session on Australia.

And today, the director of the Australians Studies Center here,

you too, Rhonda Urban’s is going to introduce our speaker. Thanks, Roger.

Well, I want to take this opportunity to thank the British studies program for once again partnering

with the Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies to bring in a speaker with an Australian

focus. I think it’s my

great pleasure to introduce today’s speaker, Michael Bachner. I know, Michael, from our

participation in the Australian New Zealand Studies Association of North America. I’ve seen

him present papers at conferences on many occasions. And so I can tell you from firsthand experience

that you’re in for a treat this afternoon with someone as distinguished career

as Michael’s. It will be hard for me to do full service to all of his accomplishments.

And so in these few minutes, I will just hit some of the highlights so as not to steal too much time from

this afternoon’s main event. Michael is a professor of history at Gettysburg College.

He took that position in nineteen eighty nine and in a sense he was returning to home in a way

because he had received his undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College before going on to

do a p._h._d in history at the University of Virginia

at Gettysburg College. He held the Benjamin Franklin Chair of Liberal Arts from 2001

to 2006, and he is a past president of the

Pennsylvania Historical Association in terms of Michael’s research interests.

They’re quite broad. He studies the 19th, 19th and 20th century America.

Or if you hear Michael narrow things down, he’s interested in the 1850s and the 1950s

with respect to his work from the 1850s. His most recent work, I think

it’s the 2019 publication date is a co-edited three volume series

entitled The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens, looking

at Michael’s research into the 1950s. He focuses largely on the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He’s published several books, including a biography of

the President for Middle School Children. In addition, he’s published a book in 2015

called Encounters with the Eisenhowers, which is firsthand meetings with the Eisenhowers

from various people. In addition, he’s partnered with the Eisenhower National

Historical Site and the Eisenhower Memorial Commission in various capacities to promote

greater understanding of the Eisenhower presidency. In closing, I think it’s important

to note, given the topic of his talk today, that Michael also has experience

working in journalism. In the 1980s, he took a brief hiatus from academia

to work as the chief editor, editorial writer for the

New Hampshire Concord Monitor newspaper. I also want to say that if you

really enjoy today’s talk, I know that Michael has at least nine videos on C-SPAN. So if you can’t get

enough, you can tune in for more. Michael Berg, parent on C-SPAN. And with that, I will turn

it over to our distinguished speaker.

Well, thank you for that generous introduction. You all remember LV Jay’s response to

abusive introductions like right where he said, but my mother would

have approved it and my father would have believed it. Well,

thank you. And I want to thank the British studies program. I want to study the

Clark Center for inviting me here. It’s a real treat. I have been fortunate enough to

do research both in the ransom center at the LBJ Library. And I envy you all who have ready access

to it as opposed to coming from the other side of the United States to do it. What magnificent research

places, what great staff. You have to help people get to the material they need and interpret

the material. You’re all lucky ducks is what I would say. But

I want to say one more thing to the two students before I get into the the

talk proper. I said something of this nature at lunch today and I thought it’s really more appropriate

for the undergraduate and graduate students. And as you have ambitions for your

own scholarship, it is really important that you make friends

with librarians and that you appreciate librarians. They are your ticket

to getting to the material that will make your careers. They’re smart

people and they have the kind of ability to get to things that the average

person does not have. And I’ll just say specifically in terms of this project. The

reason I’m here doing talking about Martin Grantski and about the American journalists

in Australia in 1942 is that a friend of mine who was a manuscripts

librarian at the Library of Congress and knowing I had been to the University of Melbourne on sabbatical several times,

saw me and said, you know, we just got this collection from the family of Martin Grantski. And I noticed

in paging through our guide that there’s some Australian material there. You might want

to take a peek. And that tip has led to many, many hours of labor

in the Grantski papers at the LSC and then expanding myself outward

to other journalists papers, as some of you know who are in journalism history. The State

Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, has a fabulous collection of different journalists papers,

and I’ve spent a good deal of time there as well. So my tip for the day, one that I think is

worth listening to, is to be good with librarians.

So this is the talk. But I want to I want to get this. This is one

of the protagonists of my talk that Cecil Brown, who was in his day,

a very famous journalist today. I don’t think one in a thousand people would tell you they know who Cecil

Brown is. But Cecil Brown had a great clout in the journalistic

world, first as a roving reporter and then in Washington, D.C., then as a book writer. And

the reason he’s up here is that he’s a character in what I’m gonna have to talk about when we’re talking about. But also,

his comments are kind of important to our theme. We fight for every word in our scripts

because in our best judgment, we feel every fact represents a fact which the American people have

a right to know. I mean, that’s the journalist’s creed, isn’t it? And Brown was a good exponent

of it. So let me let me talk about an off

the record press conference with Douglas MacArthur. That was reported on in March

of 1942 by one of Brown’s friendly competitors. Martin Grantski.

And it’s an interesting piece that I thought would be a good kick off to this talk. He

was broadcasting back to the NBC listener in the United States, and

he was sending greetings from journalists who had been just coming in, streaming

in to Australia from all points San Francisco, Batavia, Singapore

and the Philippines all coming to Australia because this is where the action was going

to be in 1942. He added this comment as he introduced the

program. The job we’re trying to do here, the job of reporting the activities

of the biggest expeditionary force of the Second World War is for all of us the most

absorbing and in many ways the toughest one of the toughest assignments we’ve ever had.

He then went on to talk about sitting on a story in March of 1942,

knowing that he had a story but could not reported. And that story was a story that

everybody was waiting to hear about. It was Douglas MacArthur, had he made it out of the Philippines,

had he made it to Australia safely? Had he taken control of the situation?

Was he going to give new hope to the Australians who feared that they would be, in fact, the next target

of Japanese expansionists? So he he says here that this is

the only story we cared about. He tells the American listener, he said. But

the headaches of coverage in Australia dealing with censorship are mountain size, but less

consequential than the headaches the American armed forces are going to face over the next

months. He turned the program over to his four to four American colleagues

to, quote, tell you what they think about being in Australia in this parlous

time. He turned specifically first to a man named Robert Sherrard, who was a Time-Life

reporter at that time and who again has fallen into the mists and term of recognition, but who was a

big deal in his day. We do not have a transcript of the rest of the program after

after a Grantski has his his words. We don’t know what Sherrod told the American listener

and we don’t know what the other three reporters who spoke that day did either. But it

was an issue of them opening a window into the subject of reporting and news management

in the Pacific theater. And that’s really the topic that I’m addressing here now

as everybody here, at least every American here knows, World War 2 started on December 7th,

historical memory. So what happens here, of course, is there’s a tremendous

demand after December 7th of 41 for news from the theater of war, whether it’s

in Europe, whether it whether it’s in Scandinavia, whether it’s in the Pacific.

But the people who came to tell the story were telling the story under some

fairly specific and in many cases restrictive conditions.

And that has to do with what they were allowed to tell. The federal government

was determined from the outset of the war, as one scholars put it, that nothing

but its version of events would be publicly available. Virtually any information

that these reporters in Australia were going to share with their listeners back home or their

audience, if they were print reporters, was going to be in some way or another from official

sources and be an official version. And the authorities had the

complete power to edit and control as they saw fit. I didn’t

think I didn’t bring it for a slide for this, but there’s there’s a great example

in the Grantski papers. It’s August 19th, 1942, in which he writes this very interesting

account of what’s going on in Australia on the Labor front. And the censor just

writes refused right on top of it. He’s not going to tell it at all.

This is the fellow I just mentioned. That’s Martin Grantski in 1942. He was 27 years

old when he when he arrived in Australia. He had been already

full time reporter in various guises for the previous six years. He was

at it. He was a graduate of Rutgers in New Jersey, had been born in Atlantic City,

got his first grounding in journalism, working for his uncle, who was the

editor of what became The Jerusalem Post. He did that for a year and then thought

he needed some bigger view of the world. And he became a freelancer. Wound up giving

doing reports for various major American publications from The New York Times to The Atlantic Monthly

was offered a job on the same day by The New York Times as a foreign correspondent

in nineteen forty one that he was offered a job by NBC Radio. And Grantski

liked the idea of of getting himself directly in view of the listener.

And so he took the NBC job, the questions that he would deal

with and the other journalists in Australia would deal with, of course, where how far could they

go in challenging? What was the official story? How much leeway could they have in telling

what they found that they did not get from official sources, but they were always

reminded we’re all on the same team. And you better remember that. And I would

go one step further. They truly believed that they were on the same team. They

were patriots. They were not interested in undermining the war effort. And what you have

here is a kind of tension between telling a true story that might be uncomfortable

for the audience you’re writing for or telling it the way that the officialdom,

for example, MacArthur and his general headquarters, want that story to be

spun. And that and that, I think, is what makes for the interesting role that they play. And also

makes it interesting for me as a historian to delve into it. So, again, I want to emphasize

don’t see what I’m saying as these reporters constantly battling

against these evil censors or these these evil officials. It’s

a matter of finding a middle way that works for everybody.

Now, let me set the stage here again for why

this fella and why Brown come to Australia. You have.

Pearl Harbor in December and then just a cascade of bad news for the allies,

particularly in the Pacific Theater in December and January, in February of 1942.

It’s almost rat a tat tat with the Japanese getting new territories and moving

beyond what any of the reporters themselves thought could happen. The exception in a way is

Claude Brown, who I have, Claude Cecil Brown, who I’ve just

introduced you to, because he is writing consistently in December and January

of 1941 and early 42, that the British are not prepared properly

to defend Singapore, that the British are just assuming that Singapore is safe because it is their

Gibraltar of the east. And he says you’re not ready for this. And he

is banging his head against the censors in Singapore consistently.

He bangs his head to the point where they get rid of him. They they withdraw his accreditation.

Then he goes over to the Dutch East Indies to report from Batavia. And he was there

for two hours, two hours, not a time to annoy them particularly. But the Dutch

say you can’t broadcast from here either because the British didn’t want you and we’re not going to get crosswise

with the British. So he has to leave Batavia. And that’s what gets him ultimately to Australia.

In February of 1942, during the same period, dozens

of American journalists, as I hinted a minute ago, are coming from different parts of the world, including

all over the United States, going often from the U.S. to San Francisco and

coming to Australia. Many of them thought they were gonna be covering the war from the Dutch East Indies.

But the events were proceeding so fast, the Japanese were moving so fast that they really couldn’t

do that. So they wind up coming to Australia and the place that they go. Most of them

is to Melbourne because you have broadcast facilities in Melbourne and also because the big

kahuna, MacArthur, is going to wind up in Melbourne. On March the 21st, 1942,

a Gretzky’s owned travel to Australia was perilous and harrowing.

He wherever he went from Singapore to various parts of the Dutch

East Indies, he was apparently constantly being one step ahead of Japanese

attacks. And according to one of the journalists, a man named George Foster, who was talking to

Cecil Brown over dinner one night when he arrived in Australia, he was bom wacky.

And he he simply had seen too many bobs and had too many close calls. And what’s interesting, too, is that

Foster, who was never friends with Grantski, I should add, predicts that that Grantski will never

cover the war again. But in fact, he was young and he was he was flexible. And he

winds up getting over that. And and it wants to be in the middle of all the action.

He gets his bearings back. So by by the end of January of 42, you’ve

got one hundred and fifteen American journalists in Australia.

I should excuse me. One hundred and fifteen accredited to cover the Pacific War.

And about 30 are going to congregate in Melbourne at general headquarters.

And they’re going to be in McCarthy’s presence. And we’ll talk a little bit in the next few minutes about how

MacArthur works with them. Now, I want to say a word about the status of a war reporter.

Some of you know, there’s some of you may not a war reporter is a Ternium

quit or third thing in Latin. They’re not civilians because

they’re wearing uniforms and they’re subject to military authority. There’s something

in between, though, because they’re not active military and they are not going to hold guns and they’re not going

to shoot anybody. So to distinguish them from civilians, these correspondents are

gonna go around in Australia wearing officers uniforms, minus any insignia of rank.

One of the little factoids about this is that there was always this ambiguity about

being a younger, private or corporate or something and seeing one of these fellows in their

uniform. Do you salute them or do you not salute them? And the way most of the reporters dealt with

it was they didn’t salute these fellows. But if someone saluted them, they’d salute them back just out of a sign,

out of a sign of respect. They were attached to headquarters of field commands

and they had access to the same facilities and transports that military people

had. They had government communication facilities accessible to

them. But the key qualification to all of this is the tradeoff

was that they were subject to censorship on everything that they submitted

to the American public. Now, what about censorship? Let’s talk a

little bit about that. First, I wanted to show you that by January 42, Darwin is

ablaze. So this is an Australian story, not just a Singapore story. And

you’ve got a deep concern in Australia. That they are next on

the Japanese table for conquest. Historians

have discussed this at great length and the basic story, if you’re not familiar with Australian well were to history,

is that the Japanese army was interested in invading

Australia, the Navy, which was more powerful, as Adam reminded me the other night.

Always said, not today, not today, not now. Maybe later. But of course, later never came.

This is the area where people are moving from. So if this gives you a more vivid or visual idea

of the Dutch East Indies at the time and how people wind up going from there

to Darwin and then ticking either planes or trains over to Melbourne.

And this is the red lines in this particular image. This is from the dust jacket

of Cecil Brown’s book, which I’ll show you later, shows you exactly how Brown

made his way to Australia. And then if you look to the right, that’s him going back to

the United States because he found that life was too uncomfortable for him in Australia. His reputation

had preceded him and he was not going to be very successful in getting his broadcasts

through. So he took the easier way out by getting a book contract and writing

what turned out to be a bestseller. I’ll come back to that.

American officials in general in the Navy were very

strict about censorship. Admiral King was famous for his refusal

to let anything go that was not going to serve his exact purposes. But King,

who had a staff that reminded him that you couldn’t just say we’re gonna have a blanket

blackout on all news until we declare the war won. He began to say,

we can play with these reporters a little bit. We can feed them some information

and maybe they will give us more positive stories which will help our purposes.

Now, I should add here that beyond American military censorship, you have

Australian censorship. So it’s a layering of censorship that these reporters are dealing with

in Australia in 1942. And there was a great concern in Australia.

You could even say a kind of paranoia in Australia that if these reporters were going

to say anything negative to them, to their audiences, that this would possibly

diminish the degree to which Franklin Roosevelt and American officialdom would be willing to support

the Australians in their time of great need, that the Australians didn’t look like they were fully aboard

in terms of doing their bit, that the Americans might say we have other things to focus on. And of

course, you know that it was a Europe first strategy in the war anyway. And the Australians were

always trying to get face time with Roosevelt to commit to more

effort in the Pacific. So the business in Australia

is another layer of censorship on these reporters.

And then there is spin and it’s my title of my talk. And we have to talk about that, too. And who

is the master of spin? But Douglas MacArthur himself.

Now, MacArthur is he is as brilliant in press management as anyone I’ve seen

in studying history. He always talked to the reporters

almost in an avuncular way about how we’re going to work together to tell the American

people the story. I favor honest reporting. He said

he gave a talk to the reporters right after he arrived in Melbourne

and he then issued a press release, which was really a verbatim account of the

talk. Let’s see if we’ve got MacArthur here. Well, these are the censors that that they’re going to deal with

and they look like a happy lot. And there’s our man, MacArthur.

And there he is on the big day, March 21st, arriving to a tumultuous welcome

in Melbourne. And those of you who are interested in Australian history will recognize the person in the next slide.

And that’s, of course, John Curtin, who is the man, the right man at the right time for Australia

during the Second World War. So MacArthur doesn’t yell at the reporters. He doesn’t demand

anything of reporters when he meets them. He says, I want your help. I want to work with you. He says,

I don’t want to suppress news. This is I’m quoting him now, but I want to get news to you. He says.

And if the reporters handle facts that he had in his headquarters responsibly,

quote, most of the criticism that you might be inclined to present will disappear. He said

he assured the reporters that they could criticise anything that they thought was wrong. Anything.

The only condition, he said was that before broadcasting or publishing, they should see him and get

his point of view on the matter. Now, whatever

assurances he gave that censorship would be reasonable and that he would quote

and I’m quoting him again, always be glad to give you my full knowledge or full opinion on any subject

I’ll be at on background, of course. The reality is, I think you’re guessing already were a little

bit different than the way MacArthur presented it. Let’s be just frank, only

positive news was acceptable to MacArthur. One student of American foreign

reporting has noted that, quote, adulation of MacArthur was welcome, but the general

did not brook criticism from the press. One member of the press corps based

at MacArthur’s headquarters, a man named Frank Jr. Vaizey, later recalled that journalists, quote, could

not write anything critical of MacArthur’s personality or his acts or anything which

might indicate that someone, somewhere at some time might disagree with MacArthur.

I got that out of a Collier’s magazine article. MacArthur’s chief press aide

was Colonel Diller. And well, these are the these are the men. Colonel

Diller is right here. That’s the grand he was known as either

Pich Diller or Killer Diller. He was. He was the closest guy to MacArthur. This fellow

who really bears a strange resemblance to Herman Gehring is is Bill Dunne,

who is the CBS reporter and was a chief rival of. Of of a Grantski

during that year, but that’s a good sense of of Diller with these people. I’ll get

I’ll get to these other report as well. I can just introduce them briefly. Now, Joe Harsh, who for

Joe Harsh was in Australia for the exact same amount of time there. Grantski was John Lardner, who wrote for Newsweek

and was really not a hard news guy. If you want to know what it was like in Australia

in 1942, not the military side, but the daily life side of things.

Nobody did it better than John Lardner. He was from the famous Lardner family of writers in

the United States. So back to the plot here.

The realities, as I’m suggesting, were pretty different from the promises.

Even seemingly innocuous information could sometimes face a blue pencil

from MacArthur’s censors. Let me give you a couple of examples. When a journalist tried to say

that during a military parade, John Philip Sousa March, Semper Fidelis

was being played. This is just report that they played Semper Fidelis. The sensor

lined it out on the grounds that it would indicate to any smart person,

you know what I’m going to say that it was the Marines. Right.

So all of the press and I’ll get into some of these other examples that that Bronski specifically

face and a couple of minutes. Any time you had

a report on a major military operation, say, the battle of chordal Coral Sea

in May of 1942. If you’re reading these transcripts or reading the

accounts, you really don’t know what the heck is going on because the reporters know very little

that they can convey. That’s what I would call hard news. So when I’m reading Grantski, who is a terrific reporter, when

I’m reading his dispatches in May of 42, I’m thinking, who won this battle? What happened in this battle?

It doesn’t come through very clearly. MacArthur, of course, wanted it that way.

He wanted the press to have be fed and watered. He wanted the press to be complicit

and compliant, but he wasn’t going to feed them information that did anything but help him.

He saw the press as an adjunct to his work, and that’s one of the reasons he was smart enough to cultivate

the press. And he wanted them to see things from his perspective. Let me. This is

later in my talk when I’m going to say it now. MacArthur again

talked one way, acted another, he says to the reporters in March of 1942, and he meets them.

He says, I want you to know I’m going to do this relationship without without

any favoritism to anybody. Nobody gets an exclusive with me. So he walks around a

table probably about the size of this table. He’s got 30 American reporters in the room.

He’s honest. He’s chugging on his corncob pipe. Right. And he’s he’s

he’s a master of the ad lib and he’s a master of responding and spinning things.

And he tells them you’re all going to be treated exactly the same. He didn’t treat people exactly

the same. He would call in individual reporters when he served his purposes

and give them a, quote, exclusive. Now, they couldn’t quote him directly. They would say the highest military source.

People knew who that was, but he would call them. And then they you know, I

was a journalist once. I know how this works. When dealing with politicians of a politician is nice to you. You tend to

be nice back to the politician. And this case, it’s a jerk. It’s it’s a general.

He gets very good press because these reporters get their so-called exclusives with him, even though he claimed

he would never do that. And of course, if you wrote things that he didn’t like, you were not going to get those exclusives.

And I might add, again, for those interested in Australian history that Thomas Blamey, who is the commander

on the ground forces and he was an Australian general, Thomas Blamey, hated the press and had a miserable

relationship with the press. And of course, most famously with Chester Wilmot, one of the greatest reporters of the Second

World War, who he basically drove out of the Pacific theater to Europe

because he made up a story about wilmet that made wilmet look bad, which wasn’t true.

MacArthur didn’t do it that way. MacArthur played the game in a much more subtle and effective

way. OK. I’ve covered the business about

MacArthur and the press. Let me turn to consideration of Brown and Grantski, because

they’re just two great characters that I’ve I’ve really gotten engaged with over the last months.

Both of them had previously, as I suggested, for Brown, run afoul of censors. Brown,

in fact, had had been thrown out of Rome before he got thrown out of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.

Grantski was thrown out of Rome. And one of Gonski’s remarks about it was he published a piece on

anti-Semitism in in Mussolini’s Italy. And he was told by officials there

that they could run Italy without his help. And so he was dismissed from

Italy. So by early, a 40 to Brown is again running into

trouble with with the authorities in Singapore that the chief British press

office in Malaya was a man named Sir George Sansone. And he told

Brown, let’s talk about being straightforward, objective reporting and the local morale

situation are irreconcilable. So he knew where he was coming

from. Brown, of course, felt he had another obligation, and that’s why Brown as soon enough kicked out of

Singapore. There’s a great back story about Brown, of course, that he was the only

American reporter on a British ship right after Pearl Harbor that was

sunk, the repulse that was sunk in. And he lives to tell about it.

And he then winds up when he decides to leave Australia. He then goes and takes this contract

to write Suez to Singapore, which was a bestseller in the year 1942. And that

that photograph, of course, is not of him in Australia, but in Egypt, I believe, earlier in the war.

Brown winds up becoming a commentator for CBS Radio, has a

long career right into the 1960s, but again, kind of disappears from our consciousness,

even though he was a top dog at the time. I do want to say one more thing about Brown.

In February of 42, about the time that Brown was going to the riving in Australia,

he gets called by Life magazine and they want him to write an article. About what’s the

deal in Australia? What can you say that Americans need to know about Australia? And he writes

this piece and it’s called the Australians and it appeared in Life magazine in June of 1942.

It’s a it’s an interesting piece because it kind of goes in different directions. On

the one hand, the Australians are great people. They’ve got a great character. They’re terrific fighters.

There are allies by blood. They’re our allies, by by ideology, their allies and belief

and in our democracy and all of that. But then he also screws through it

some fairly tough reporting about how Australian workers,

particularly dock workers, were not doing their jobs and how they were working very

short hours and taking lots of breaks. And the Japanese, as he says in the article, they’re not

working 30 hours a week. They’re working 70 hours a week. This is a problem, he says.

Well, this infuriated the tempestuous foreign minister of Australia, a guy named

h.v. Evatt, who who penned a very sharp rebuttal

to Brown, even though what Brown had said was absolutely true and send it off to Life

magazine. And I thought it was interesting. It probably went right up to Henry Luce. The article

appeared in June of 1943. Everts rebuttal was written in late June 43.

The the the letter to the editor was published in March. Of

that was 42 with a letter to the editor was published in March of 43. So it took nine months

for for The Life magazine to publish the letter to the editor. Talk about burying it right

now. Grantski a Grantski had stuck up for Brown. You know, this isn’t a

case where you have a rival in the journalistic world and you sort of

have a shayden for it that the person’s in trouble, right? A Kreisky went right at the censors

and said Brown has done nothing wrong. He’s always played by the rulebook. He’s giving honest

reporting. And he has never broken any of his responsible actions

in terms of censor showing his material to censors. He’s just fighting with you to get his stories

through. And that made, of course, a friend for life with him with Cecil Brown.

A Grantski himself makes a big splash

early in his visit to Australia in February of forty two. And

I’m going to come back to this at the end, because it gets him kicked out of or gets him prevented from

covering the war further in Australia. There was an event that happened where bad

shells in the American navy and bad direction had prevented

a an effective response to a Japanese attack in the Dutch East Indies.

And he reports this and it makes the front page of The New York Times. What he does not know, even though

nothing happens to him immediately, is that the Navy has filed this away

as this guy is bad news and we’re gonna get him. And they do.

Now, he does continue to report for the next six months, and these are the crucial six months as far as Australians

are concerned. What is his what is he doing as a reporter? Well, he’s filing

twice a day, morning and evening, at least five days a week. And he’s writing

his copy on the fly. And we you can read it in the library, Congress. I’m going to show you some examples

in a minute or so. Grantski.

Does not make himself out to be Peck’s bad boy of journalism.

He tells the story the way MacArthur wanted told. We have a war to win in

the Pacific theater. We don’t have the resources to do what we need to do to win that war.

We have a great general and Douglas MacArthur. We’ve got to give him the tools to work with. So in that

sense, A, Grantski is doing exactly what the spin meister himself would want

a Grantski to do. He talks about

the great resolve of the air power

in Australia and the United States. The pilots specifically and how they’re going up and they’re doing the job

for the country. One of his feel good stories, which is a periodic story that he

interweaves into his his broadcasts, is interviewing pilots and getting them to

unpack a particular flight that they did and making the reader or the listener in this case

feel like that they were there with the pilots. He quotes h.v. Evatt himself

as saying at one point that if we did not provide more support for the Australians

militarily and with munitions, there might not be in Australia to come back to.

And interestingly enough, that was censored by the Australian the Australian

press censors. Now, what do you deal with

in terms of Australian censorship? You deal with people who are pretty hard core.

This first is a Grantski talking about a free press. And it’s interesting that his comments about

a free press are printed in an Australian newspaper in which he’s making the case

that, you know, in every country that goes to the access, people don’t know the truth. We have

to tell the truth. The press has a job to tell the government of the temper and the conditions, the people, etc.

That’s that appears in an Australian paper. But then he has to run in first with Killer Diller.

Right. Who is a thorn in his and other reporters sides. And then this

fella, Edmund Garnett. Barney and I want to say a couple of words about Barney. He was

a former editorial writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and he was appointed chief censor for Australia

in April of 1941. His reputation was for the most

expansive possible interpretation of what could be censored, especially

for overseas press reports. He he he not only censored

military information, but anything that might affect Australia’s reputation in the United

States. Anything that might make Australia look is anything other than an effective and

willing partner of the Americans would not get through. Author Robert Bell argues

that as a result of this, the impact of Australian censors was to make the Australian

press behave more like a propaganda arm of the government than a genuine free agent.

But what I like and I’m going to share with you now is what his own staff said about

Barney. They offered a ditty, My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie

lies over the sea, and sometimes I get the notion, my Bonnie lies also to me.

There there is again, Diller leading the pack of American journalists, including

by my friend Bill Dunn, carrying a koala bear. Right. It’s a great it’s a great piece.

I Grantski is unfortunately not in this particular

picture. And and Brown had already left. But this fellow right here might be worth noting, because

some of you will know about his children. This is Byron, Barney, Darnton.

I don’t know how many of you know this story, but Barney Darnton was The New York Times reporter who was to cover the war

in the Pacific. Gartin goes over in the first among the first landings

in New Guinea in the fall of 19 September of 1942. And he is killed

by friendly fire. And it was it was a horrible thing. The reason

I mentioned it, some of you know about his kids is that some of you may have heard of Robert

or John daughton. They were both very small. Robert Darnton, the Princeton

professor and director of the Harvard University Library, a great French

historian. John Darnton, New York Times reporter, prize winner for many years. I

think that Robert was four years old and John was a year and a half when their father was killed in the war.

So this is this is not beanbag. This is serious stuff. Now,

as far as dealing with censor’s go, this is a hard thing to know, absent being able

to interview someone who served as a journalist in Australia at the time. How much

cat and mouse did they play? How much self-censorship were they engaged in? How much did

they sneak things through? How much did they just count on their relationship building with sensors

to enable them to get more in? They might not might otherwise get.

I’ll tell you right now that one of my I would say instincts in reading

these these transcripts very closely is that in many cases

you do see blue pencil. And I’m gonna show you the blue pencil in a second. But you also notice

that the senses are acting as copy editors, because you can see

they see that a better word could be used to describe something. And you see the blue pencil

with the better word. So I think there’s a I wouldn’t call it a symbiotic relationship because that doesn’t seem

right. But there is a relationship that goes on when you’re working with the same sensors

over a period of months. And in some cases, the sensors are trying to help you, not just toward you.

And I think that, again, adds to what we were talking about. I was talking about with Rhonda before about the need

for complexity in in working with our students and getting the word out to our students about

what the issue is in any given case. So I’ve just talked

about reviewing some of these transcripts. Let me tell you about some of the things that he couldn’t get through.

He couldn’t talk about any thing that was pessimistic about where the allies

stood in relation to the war. He couldn’t talk about fifth columnists, organisations

in Australia that had been unearthed. He couldn’t talk about labor disputes

at all. He couldn’t publish information that he got

from cabinet officers about troubles that they were having. Whether it was logistics or militarily,

he couldn’t talk about the coal situation in Australia. All of this stuff when he tried to write about it

was blue penciled when he when he reported about the disappointing

results of a Liberty loan campaign in 1942. Again, blue pencil. But here’s my favorite

in the summer of 42. He goes, he travels, and I think he’s in Brisbane.

And he writes an account of a woman I in Newcastle. He writes an account of

a woman customer in a Newcastle store in a scrum of, quote,

clothes hungry shoppers who bit a shop employee blocking her rush to the bargain

bins. And he can’t publish that either.

So let’s get to what you may be interested in here. And that is, does it matter how much or how much of all? What

I’ve said actually matters. And I think the answer that I would offer has

to be viewed amid admittedly a subjective I would say that the censorship

that that GROSKIN is peers dealt with was annoying, but it was a price that

they were more than willing to pay. They were Americans. They were patriots. They wanted the

the war effort to go well. I’m also struck by how much

interesting and valuable information the listener on NBC Radio to a Grantski or

to CBS of Bill Dunn, who wrote in a much less dramatic way than a Grantski did. I’m

interested. I would say they got a pretty good sense of it now. In the case of a Grantski,

I would say that it wasn’t so much that he slanted the news to get through the centers as he

highlighted situations that he himself believed to be true. So, for example, he believed

that MacArthur was the key man and that we needed to give MacArthur more authority in the Pacific war, that

we need to give MacArthur more resources, or we couldn’t possibly be successful. That’s not a case

of him running against any grain. It’s what he believed. And I think that would be true

of of his computers as well. Now, he did,

as I say, occasionally punctuate the hard news stuff with softer news about

how American G.I.s were doing. I love the interviews that he would do with American G.I.s, and he’d ask them what they think

of Australian coffee or what they think of other pieces of the Australian diet.

And of course, the Americans were always tell them that they wanted what they were used to back in the United States.

And please get me that if you can. And some people then would send it. Some of his

his reporting had a kind of gee whiz, how impressive was that element to it? And that was when

he would introduce pilots to the American audience. He really

wanted to have a feel good element in his reporting, too. And and that was part of the reality

of it. Now, I’m going to close or bring us toward the close here

with how a Grantski falls a foul. And it relates to what I said to you about

February of 1942. There’s Bonnie. These are this is a

well, I’ll take a second here. This is a typical dispatch that I’m reading in the Library of Congress.

And the blew up there is the censors. I think the brown is the coffee spilling.

But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I’m gonna show you three three examples

of a dispatch with with a good deal of blue penciling. These are the other two. Right.

I don’t want to give you the impression that this. Every day there are dispatches where only

that’s only a word or two is deleted or changed. But

these are things that he had to deal with when he got the blue pencil. That was it. He couldn’t he could cajole

maybe, but generally he went along with it because he knew he wanted to live to fight another day.

So that that will give you some idea from May of 42. And that’s just when we’re getting to the Battle

of Coral Sea. Here’s one more. July 26, 1942. You can see very clearly

the blue lines. If you really want to study, you can see exactly what was problematic from the sensors point of view.

Notice in the upper right hand corner, every single transcript has that, because

otherwise it doesn’t get through. It doesn’t get recorded. So what happens to mess

things up for Gonski? Well, literally, the

week he arrives, bom wacky as it was said from the Dutch East Indies,

he tells his story to his listeners about this

Japanese air patrol and this fight in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean on February

and what it was likely to do next. Emphasizing how poorly the British were prepared to

fight in Singapore, this becomes the basis for

his scoop. Here’s some bad news. And it’s the truth, he says.

To start with, it is painfully clear that the allied nations, unless their policy changes immediately,

are in serious danger of complete defeat in eastern and Western Asia.

And then he referred to a, quote, first class Jap Army, Navy and Air Force led by

decisive commanders, which he said contrasted to an allied command that was consistently

dealing with internal squabbles over authority. And then he says

that Americans needed to face up to the fact that they hadn’t done much to

alter the balance of power in the war. As of February. But it gets worse

in on February the 23rd. He broadcasts from Sydney about

this military attack against 32 Japanese bombers and how

futile it was. Why was it futile? Because, he says.

The ship’s antiaircraft ammunition was more than a decade ago, and 70 percent of

the shells that the men tried to fire were duds and that the antiaircraft

guns targeting Japanese planes could not do so with any accuracy because the material

they were working with was defective. He also tells about RAAF pilots trying to

enter the fight in Singapore who were told they had no orders to do it and that they should return to base

in Java for further instructions. This is what comes out of that broadcast.

His scoop? Allied ineptitude in the Pacific. You can imagine what Frank Knox,

the secretary of the Navy, thought when he read this. Here you go, the follow up. This

is The New York Times. The front page. Right. Defective shells charged to Navy and far

convoy protection. Now, what’s surprising to me is that a Grantski wasn’t immediately slapped down

for I don’t really know the answer to that. But what happens in August of 1942

is he has been going for three years in a row and he is worn down emotionally

as well as physically. He’s at the end of his rope. He needs to get some R&R.

He decides he wants to go back to the United States, figuring that there was going to be an offensive in

New Guinea in September. He had his the word out about that. He’ll take a couple of months. He’ll get

his mojo back, and then he’ll go back into the reporting. Guess what

goes back to the US. He’d already irritated as Brown had his producers by being as tough

as he was. They told him to ratchet it back. And of course, he didn’t want to.

The key thing for a Grantski is he has to get re credited to go back to the

military theater and the Navy will not give him his accreditation. He doesn’t know this.

Nobody tells him they’re not going to give it to him. They just say, we’ll keep waiting, keep waiting. And it doesn’t come

through. So one month goes by. Two, three, four. In December 42.

And by the way, I got to just say quickly. He falls in love in Australia. And that’s another reason he wants

to to go back, because an American army nurse is waiting for him in Australia

and he is going crazy. And you off your shorts have to read his letters to know all the details about

that. But he uses a contact he has

in the Air Force general named Ralph Royce to get actually an interview with the

Navy secretary, who I think I have for you here. Frank Knox.

And so he finally gets to go because he get no answers about why he can’t get back to Australia. He

could finally gets an audience with Frank Knox in December of 1942. And he figures

that one on one who persuade Knox and Knox says you’re a troublemaker.

Knox doesn’t directly tell him you’ll never get back to Australia. He says, I can’t promise to do a thing

for you because you have a reputation. And of course, the accreditation never materializes.

And A Grantski winds up going on a lecture tour. He doesn’t write a book, but he he gets himself

a contract with the Blue Network, which is a precursor of ABC to be a commentator fruit for

them. So let me close. And

by the way, he does eventually get back together with Helen Smathers,

who is the woman that he fell in love with in Australia, marries and has kids. And

it was for them a happily ever after until she was killed in a fire. Some years later,

this is him on his lecture tour as he comes back to the states. So summing up,

what do you make of all of this? I think I make that these these reporters did a

as good a job as they could do under difficult circumstances. They recognise the limits they were under.

They work with them. In some cases, they work around them. Whether we’re talking

about a Grantski Brown, Lewis Sebring of The New York Herald Tribune, John Lardner,

Barney Darnton, George Weller. These guys were first class correspondents, Joe Harsh

in the end and the others in the process of covering the Pacific War. They

didn’t lighten the listening public back home and the reading public. They helped shape policymakers

understanding of what was going on in this vitally important theater. And by and large,

they made sense. And I’ll stop right there. Thank you.