{"id":409,"date":"2019-10-22T20:32:19","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T20:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=podcast&p=409"},"modified":"2021-01-20T20:27:00","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T20:27:00","slug":"facts-censorship-and-spin-covering-the-pacific-war-from-australia-1942","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast\/facts-censorship-and-spin-covering-the-pacific-war-from-australia-1942\/","title":{"rendered":"Facts, Censorship, and Spin: Covering the Pacific War from Australia, 1942"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker – Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College <\/span><\/p>\n

This lecture is about journalists based in Australia practicing their craft in 1942, when the prospect of a Japanese invasion was impending. How did professional standards compare with daily practice? Most information came from official sources, and draft articles had to run the gantlet of military censors. What were the trade-offs for reporters, including self-censorship? How well did the journalists manage to inform their readers back home? <\/span><\/p>\n

Michael J. Birkner is Professor of History at Gettysburg College, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American political history, including three edited volumes on Pennsylvania\u2019s only president, James Buchanan, and three books on Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 2003 and 2006 he served as a member of the history jury for the Pulitzer Prize, chairing the jury in 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College This lecture is about journalists based in Australia practicing their craft in 1942, when the prospect of a Japanese invasion was impending. How did professional standards compare with daily practice? Most information came from official sources, and draft articles had to run the gantlet of military censors. What […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/10\/19-10-18-British-Studies-Lecture-Series.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"59.17M","filesize_raw":"62047808","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[282,64,288,279,278,285,284,283,287,286,281,280],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-409","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-282","6":"tag-australia","7":"tag-birker","8":"tag-censorship","9":"tag-facts","10":"tag-japanese-invasion","11":"tag-journalism","12":"tag-journalists","13":"tag-michael-birker","14":"tag-military","15":"tag-pacific-war","16":"tag-spin","17":"series-bsls","18":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n

Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":769,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 18:45:24","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 18:45:24","post_content":"\n

Michael J. Birkner is Professor of History at Gettysburg College, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American political history, including three edited volumes on Pennsylvania\u2019s only president, James Buchanan, and three books on Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 2003 and 2006 he served as a member of the history jury for the Pulitzer Prize, chairing the jury in 2006.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Michael J. Birkner","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"michael-j-birkner","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 18:45:24","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 18:45:24","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=769","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":817,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:31:19","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:31:19","post_content":"\n

Dr. Rhonda Evans, J.D., directs the Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at UT-Austin and is a Senior Lecturer in the Government Department. She is a principal investigator for the Australian and New Zealand Policy Agendas Projects. Her research on courts and human rights appears in the Australian Journal of Political Science, Congress and the Presidency, Osgoode Hall Law Review, and Journal of Common Market Studies. She co-authored Legislating Equality published by Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Rhonda Evans","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"rhonda-evans","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:31:19","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:31:19","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=817","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

We’re always very glad whenever we go to have a session on Australia.<\/p>\n

And today, the director of the Australians Studies Center here,<\/p>\n

you too, Rhonda Urban’s is going to introduce our speaker. Thanks, Roger.<\/p>\n

Well, I want to take this opportunity to thank the British studies program for once again partnering<\/p>\n

with the Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies to bring in a speaker with an Australian<\/p>\n

focus. I think it’s my<\/p>\n

great pleasure to introduce today’s speaker, Michael Bachner. I know, Michael, from our<\/p>\n

participation in the Australian New Zealand Studies Association of North America. I’ve seen<\/p>\n

him present papers at conferences on many occasions. And so I can tell you from firsthand experience<\/p>\n

that you’re in for a treat this afternoon with someone as distinguished career<\/p>\n

as Michael’s. It will be hard for me to do full service to all of his accomplishments.<\/p>\n

And so in these few minutes, I will just hit some of the highlights so as not to steal too much time from<\/p>\n

this afternoon’s main event. Michael is a professor of history at Gettysburg College.<\/p>\n

He took that position in nineteen eighty nine and in a sense he was returning to home in a way<\/p>\n

because he had received his undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College before going on to<\/p>\n

do a p._h._d in history at the University of Virginia<\/p>\n

at Gettysburg College. He held the Benjamin Franklin Chair of Liberal Arts from 2001<\/p>\n

to 2006, and he is a past president of the<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania Historical Association in terms of Michael’s research interests.<\/p>\n

They’re quite broad. He studies the 19th, 19th and 20th century America.<\/p>\n

Or if you hear Michael narrow things down, he’s interested in the 1850s and the 1950s<\/p>\n

with respect to his work from the 1850s. His most recent work, I think<\/p>\n

it’s the 2019 publication date is a co-edited three volume series<\/p>\n

entitled The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens, looking<\/p>\n

at Michael’s research into the 1950s. He focuses largely on the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.<\/p>\n

He’s published several books, including a biography of<\/p>\n

the President for Middle School Children. In addition, he’s published a book in 2015<\/p>\n

called Encounters with the Eisenhowers, which is firsthand meetings with the Eisenhowers<\/p>\n

from various people. In addition, he’s partnered with the Eisenhower National<\/p>\n

Historical Site and the Eisenhower Memorial Commission in various capacities to promote<\/p>\n

greater understanding of the Eisenhower presidency. In closing, I think it’s important<\/p>\n

to note, given the topic of his talk today, that Michael also has experience<\/p>\n

working in journalism. In the 1980s, he took a brief hiatus from academia<\/p>\n

to work as the chief editor, editorial writer for the<\/p>\n

New Hampshire Concord Monitor newspaper. I also want to say that if you<\/p>\n

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

enough, you can tune in for more. Michael Berg, parent on C-SPAN. And with that, I will turn<\/p>\n

it over to our distinguished speaker.<\/p>\n

Well, thank you for that generous introduction. You all remember LV Jay’s response to<\/p>\n

abusive introductions like right where he said, but my mother would<\/p>\n

have approved it and my father would have believed it. Well,<\/p>\n

thank you. And I want to thank the British studies program. I want to study the<\/p>\n

Clark Center for inviting me here. It’s a real treat. I have been fortunate enough to<\/p>\n

do research both in the ransom center at the LBJ Library. And I envy you all who have ready access<\/p>\n

to it as opposed to coming from the other side of the United States to do it. What magnificent research<\/p>\n

places, what great staff. You have to help people get to the material they need and interpret<\/p>\n

the material. You’re all lucky ducks is what I would say. But<\/p>\n

I want to say one more thing to the two students before I get into the the<\/p>\n

talk proper. I said something of this nature at lunch today and I thought it’s really more appropriate<\/p>\n

for the undergraduate and graduate students. And as you have ambitions for your<\/p>\n

own scholarship, it is really important that you make friends<\/p>\n

with librarians and that you appreciate librarians. They are your ticket<\/p>\n

to getting to the material that will make your careers. They’re smart<\/p>\n

people and they have the kind of ability to get to things that the average<\/p>\n

person does not have. And I’ll just say specifically in terms of this project. The<\/p>\n

reason I’m here doing talking about Martin Grantski and about the American journalists<\/p>\n

in Australia in 1942 is that a friend of mine who was a manuscripts<\/p>\n

librarian at the Library of Congress and knowing I had been to the University of Melbourne on sabbatical several times,<\/p>\n

saw me and said, you know, we just got this collection from the family of Martin Grantski. And I noticed<\/p>\n

in paging through our guide that there’s some Australian material there. You might want<\/p>\n

to take a peek. And that tip has led to many, many hours of labor<\/p>\n

in the Grantski papers at the LSC and then expanding myself outward<\/p>\n

to other journalists papers, as some of you know who are in journalism history. The State<\/p>\n

Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, has a fabulous collection of different journalists papers,<\/p>\n

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

worth listening to, is to be good with librarians.<\/p>\n

So this is the talk. But I want to I want to get this. This is one<\/p>\n

of the protagonists of my talk that Cecil Brown, who was in his day,<\/p>\n

a very famous journalist today. I don’t think one in a thousand people would tell you they know who Cecil<\/p>\n

Brown is. But Cecil Brown had a great clout in the journalistic<\/p>\n

world, first as a roving reporter and then in Washington, D.C., then as a book writer. And<\/p>\n

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,<\/p>\n

his comments are kind of important to our theme. We fight for every word in our scripts<\/p>\n

because in our best judgment, we feel every fact represents a fact which the American people have<\/p>\n

a right to know. I mean, that’s the journalist’s creed, isn’t it? And Brown was a good exponent<\/p>\n

of it. So let me let me talk about an off<\/p>\n

the record press conference with Douglas MacArthur. That was reported on in March<\/p>\n

of 1942 by one of Brown’s friendly competitors. Martin Grantski.<\/p>\n

And it’s an interesting piece that I thought would be a good kick off to this talk. He<\/p>\n

was broadcasting back to the NBC listener in the United States, and<\/p>\n

he was sending greetings from journalists who had been just coming in, streaming<\/p>\n

in to Australia from all points San Francisco, Batavia, Singapore<\/p>\n

and the Philippines all coming to Australia because this is where the action was going<\/p>\n

to be in 1942. He added this comment as he introduced the<\/p>\n

program. The job we’re trying to do here, the job of reporting the activities<\/p>\n

of the biggest expeditionary force of the Second World War is for all of us the most<\/p>\n

absorbing and in many ways the toughest one of the toughest assignments we’ve ever had.<\/p>\n

He then went on to talk about sitting on a story in March of 1942,<\/p>\n

knowing that he had a story but could not reported. And that story was a story that<\/p>\n

everybody was waiting to hear about. It was Douglas MacArthur, had he made it out of the Philippines,<\/p>\n

had he made it to Australia safely? Had he taken control of the situation?<\/p>\n

Was he going to give new hope to the Australians who feared that they would be, in fact, the next target<\/p>\n

of Japanese expansionists? So he he says here that this is<\/p>\n

the only story we cared about. He tells the American listener, he said. But<\/p>\n

the headaches of coverage in Australia dealing with censorship are mountain size, but less<\/p>\n

consequential than the headaches the American armed forces are going to face over the next<\/p>\n

months. He turned the program over to his four to four American colleagues<\/p>\n

to, quote, tell you what they think about being in Australia in this parlous<\/p>\n

time. He turned specifically first to a man named Robert Sherrard, who was a Time-Life<\/p>\n

reporter at that time and who again has fallen into the mists and term of recognition, but who was a<\/p>\n

big deal in his day. We do not have a transcript of the rest of the program after<\/p>\n

after a Grantski has his his words. We don’t know what Sherrod told the American listener<\/p>\n

and we don’t know what the other three reporters who spoke that day did either. But it<\/p>\n

was an issue of them opening a window into the subject of reporting and news management<\/p>\n

in the Pacific theater. And that’s really the topic that I’m addressing here now<\/p>\n

as everybody here, at least every American here knows, World War 2 started on December 7th,<\/p>\n

historical memory. So what happens here, of course, is there’s a tremendous<\/p>\n

demand after December 7th of 41 for news from the theater of war, whether it’s<\/p>\n

in Europe, whether it whether it’s in Scandinavia, whether it’s in the Pacific.<\/p>\n

But the people who came to tell the story were telling the story under some<\/p>\n

fairly specific and in many cases restrictive conditions.<\/p>\n

And that has to do with what they were allowed to tell. The federal government<\/p>\n

was determined from the outset of the war, as one scholars put it, that nothing<\/p>\n

but its version of events would be publicly available. Virtually any information<\/p>\n

that these reporters in Australia were going to share with their listeners back home or their<\/p>\n

audience, if they were print reporters, was going to be in some way or another from official<\/p>\n

sources and be an official version. And the authorities had the<\/p>\n

complete power to edit and control as they saw fit. I didn’t<\/p>\n

think I didn’t bring it for a slide for this, but there’s there’s a great example<\/p>\n

in the Grantski papers. It’s August 19th, 1942, in which he writes this very interesting<\/p>\n

account of what’s going on in Australia on the Labor front. And the censor just<\/p>\n

writes refused right on top of it. He’s not going to tell it at all.<\/p>\n

This is the fellow I just mentioned. That’s Martin Grantski in 1942. He was 27 years<\/p>\n

old when he when he arrived in Australia. He had been already<\/p>\n

full time reporter in various guises for the previous six years. He was<\/p>\n

at it. He was a graduate of Rutgers in New Jersey, had been born in Atlantic City,<\/p>\n

got his first grounding in journalism, working for his uncle, who was the<\/p>\n

editor of what became The Jerusalem Post. He did that for a year and then thought<\/p>\n

he needed some bigger view of the world. And he became a freelancer. Wound up giving<\/p>\n

doing reports for various major American publications from The New York Times to The Atlantic Monthly<\/p>\n

was offered a job on the same day by The New York Times as a foreign correspondent<\/p>\n

in nineteen forty one that he was offered a job by NBC Radio. And Grantski<\/p>\n

liked the idea of of getting himself directly in view of the listener.<\/p>\n

And so he took the NBC job, the questions that he would deal<\/p>\n

with and the other journalists in Australia would deal with, of course, where how far could they<\/p>\n

go in challenging? What was the official story? How much leeway could they have in telling<\/p>\n

what they found that they did not get from official sources, but they were always<\/p>\n

reminded we’re all on the same team. And you better remember that. And I would<\/p>\n

go one step further. They truly believed that they were on the same team. They<\/p>\n

were patriots. They were not interested in undermining the war effort. And what you have<\/p>\n

here is a kind of tension between telling a true story that might be uncomfortable<\/p>\n

for the audience you’re writing for or telling it the way that the officialdom,<\/p>\n

for example, MacArthur and his general headquarters, want that story to be<\/p>\n

spun. And that and that, I think, is what makes for the interesting role that they play. And also<\/p>\n

makes it interesting for me as a historian to delve into it. So, again, I want to emphasize<\/p>\n

don’t see what I’m saying as these reporters constantly battling<\/p>\n

against these evil censors or these these evil officials. It’s<\/p>\n

a matter of finding a middle way that works for everybody.<\/p>\n

Now, let me set the stage here again for why<\/p>\n

this fella and why Brown come to Australia. You have.<\/p>\n

Pearl Harbor in December and then just a cascade of bad news for the allies,<\/p>\n

particularly in the Pacific Theater in December and January, in February of 1942.<\/p>\n

It’s almost rat a tat tat with the Japanese getting new territories and moving<\/p>\n

beyond what any of the reporters themselves thought could happen. The exception in a way is<\/p>\n

Claude Brown, who I have, Claude Cecil Brown, who I’ve just<\/p>\n

introduced you to, because he is writing consistently in December and January<\/p>\n

of 1941 and early 42, that the British are not prepared properly<\/p>\n

to defend Singapore, that the British are just assuming that Singapore is safe because it is their<\/p>\n

Gibraltar of the east. And he says you’re not ready for this. And he<\/p>\n

is banging his head against the censors in Singapore consistently.<\/p>\n

He bangs his head to the point where they get rid of him. They they withdraw his accreditation.<\/p>\n

Then he goes over to the Dutch East Indies to report from Batavia. And he was there<\/p>\n

for two hours, two hours, not a time to annoy them particularly. But the Dutch<\/p>\n

say you can’t broadcast from here either because the British didn’t want you and we’re not going to get crosswise<\/p>\n

with the British. So he has to leave Batavia. And that’s what gets him ultimately to Australia.<\/p>\n

In February of 1942, during the same period, dozens<\/p>\n

of American journalists, as I hinted a minute ago, are coming from different parts of the world, including<\/p>\n

all over the United States, going often from the U.S. to San Francisco and<\/p>\n

coming to Australia. Many of them thought they were gonna be covering the war from the Dutch East Indies.<\/p>\n

But the events were proceeding so fast, the Japanese were moving so fast that they really couldn’t<\/p>\n

do that. So they wind up coming to Australia and the place that they go. Most of them<\/p>\n

is to Melbourne because you have broadcast facilities in Melbourne and also because the big<\/p>\n

kahuna, MacArthur, is going to wind up in Melbourne. On March the 21st, 1942,<\/p>\n

a Gretzky’s owned travel to Australia was perilous and harrowing.<\/p>\n

He wherever he went from Singapore to various parts of the Dutch<\/p>\n

East Indies, he was apparently constantly being one step ahead of Japanese<\/p>\n

attacks. And according to one of the journalists, a man named George Foster, who was talking to<\/p>\n

Cecil Brown over dinner one night when he arrived in Australia, he was bom wacky.<\/p>\n

And he he simply had seen too many bobs and had too many close calls. And what’s interesting, too, is that<\/p>\n

Foster, who was never friends with Grantski, I should add, predicts that that Grantski will never<\/p>\n

cover the war again. But in fact, he was young and he was he was flexible. And he<\/p>\n

winds up getting over that. And and it wants to be in the middle of all the action.<\/p>\n

He gets his bearings back. So by by the end of January of 42, you’ve<\/p>\n

got one hundred and fifteen American journalists in Australia.<\/p>\n

I should excuse me. One hundred and fifteen accredited to cover the Pacific War.<\/p>\n

And about 30 are going to congregate in Melbourne at general headquarters.<\/p>\n

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

MacArthur works with them. Now, I want to say a word about the status of a war reporter.<\/p>\n

Some of you know, there’s some of you may not a war reporter is a Ternium<\/p>\n

quit or third thing in Latin. They’re not civilians because<\/p>\n

they’re wearing uniforms and they’re subject to military authority. There’s something<\/p>\n

in between, though, because they’re not active military and they are not going to hold guns and they’re not going<\/p>\n

to shoot anybody. So to distinguish them from civilians, these correspondents are<\/p>\n

gonna go around in Australia wearing officers uniforms, minus any insignia of rank.<\/p>\n

One of the little factoids about this is that there was always this ambiguity about<\/p>\n

being a younger, private or corporate or something and seeing one of these fellows in their<\/p>\n

uniform. Do you salute them or do you not salute them? And the way most of the reporters dealt with<\/p>\n

it was they didn’t salute these fellows. But if someone saluted them, they’d salute them back just out of a sign,<\/p>\n

out of a sign of respect. They were attached to headquarters of field commands<\/p>\n

and they had access to the same facilities and transports that military people<\/p>\n

had. They had government communication facilities accessible to<\/p>\n

them. But the key qualification to all of this is the tradeoff<\/p>\n

was that they were subject to censorship on everything that they submitted<\/p>\n

to the American public. Now, what about censorship? Let’s talk a<\/p>\n

little bit about that. First, I wanted to show you that by January 42, Darwin is<\/p>\n

ablaze. So this is an Australian story, not just a Singapore story. And<\/p>\n

you’ve got a deep concern in Australia. That they are next on<\/p>\n

the Japanese table for conquest. Historians<\/p>\n

have discussed this at great length and the basic story, if you’re not familiar with Australian well were to history,<\/p>\n

is that the Japanese army was interested in invading<\/p>\n

Australia, the Navy, which was more powerful, as Adam reminded me the other night.<\/p>\n

Always said, not today, not today, not now. Maybe later. But of course, later never came.<\/p>\n

This is the area where people are moving from. So if this gives you a more vivid or visual idea<\/p>\n

of the Dutch East Indies at the time and how people wind up going from there<\/p>\n

to Darwin and then ticking either planes or trains over to Melbourne.<\/p>\n

And this is the red lines in this particular image. This is from the dust jacket<\/p>\n

of Cecil Brown’s book, which I’ll show you later, shows you exactly how Brown<\/p>\n

made his way to Australia. And then if you look to the right, that’s him going back to<\/p>\n

the United States because he found that life was too uncomfortable for him in Australia. His reputation<\/p>\n

had preceded him and he was not going to be very successful in getting his broadcasts<\/p>\n

through. So he took the easier way out by getting a book contract and writing<\/p>\n

what turned out to be a bestseller. I’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n

American officials in general in the Navy were very<\/p>\n

strict about censorship. Admiral King was famous for his refusal<\/p>\n

to let anything go that was not going to serve his exact purposes. But King,<\/p>\n

who had a staff that reminded him that you couldn’t just say we’re gonna have a blanket<\/p>\n

blackout on all news until we declare the war won. He began to say,<\/p>\n

we can play with these reporters a little bit. We can feed them some information<\/p>\n

and maybe they will give us more positive stories which will help our purposes.<\/p>\n

Now, I should add here that beyond American military censorship, you have<\/p>\n

Australian censorship. So it’s a layering of censorship that these reporters are dealing with<\/p>\n

in Australia in 1942. And there was a great concern in Australia.<\/p>\n

You could even say a kind of paranoia in Australia that if these reporters were going<\/p>\n

to say anything negative to them, to their audiences, that this would possibly<\/p>\n

diminish the degree to which Franklin Roosevelt and American officialdom would be willing to support<\/p>\n

the Australians in their time of great need, that the Australians didn’t look like they were fully aboard<\/p>\n

in terms of doing their bit, that the Americans might say we have other things to focus on. And of<\/p>\n

course, you know that it was a Europe first strategy in the war anyway. And the Australians were<\/p>\n

always trying to get face time with Roosevelt to commit to more<\/p>\n

effort in the Pacific. So the business in Australia<\/p>\n

is another layer of censorship on these reporters.<\/p>\n

And then there is spin and it’s my title of my talk. And we have to talk about that, too. And who<\/p>\n

is the master of spin? But Douglas MacArthur himself.<\/p>\n

Now, MacArthur is he is as brilliant in press management as anyone I’ve seen<\/p>\n

in studying history. He always talked to the reporters<\/p>\n

almost in an avuncular way about how we’re going to work together to tell the American<\/p>\n

people the story. I favor honest reporting. He said<\/p>\n

he gave a talk to the reporters right after he arrived in Melbourne<\/p>\n

and he then issued a press release, which was really a verbatim account of the<\/p>\n

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

and they look like a happy lot. And there’s our man, MacArthur.<\/p>\n

And there he is on the big day, March 21st, arriving to a tumultuous welcome<\/p>\n

in Melbourne. And those of you who are interested in Australian history will recognize the person in the next slide.<\/p>\n

And that’s, of course, John Curtin, who is the man, the right man at the right time for Australia<\/p>\n

during the Second World War. So MacArthur doesn’t yell at the reporters. He doesn’t demand<\/p>\n

anything of reporters when he meets them. He says, I want your help. I want to work with you. He says,<\/p>\n

I don’t want to suppress news. This is I’m quoting him now, but I want to get news to you. He says.<\/p>\n

And if the reporters handle facts that he had in his headquarters responsibly,<\/p>\n

quote, most of the criticism that you might be inclined to present will disappear. He said<\/p>\n

he assured the reporters that they could criticise anything that they thought was wrong. Anything.<\/p>\n

The only condition, he said was that before broadcasting or publishing, they should see him and get<\/p>\n

his point of view on the matter. Now, whatever<\/p>\n

assurances he gave that censorship would be reasonable and that he would quote<\/p>\n

and I’m quoting him again, always be glad to give you my full knowledge or full opinion on any subject<\/p>\n

I’ll be at on background, of course. The reality is, I think you’re guessing already were a little<\/p>\n

bit different than the way MacArthur presented it. Let’s be just frank, only<\/p>\n

positive news was acceptable to MacArthur. One student of American foreign<\/p>\n

reporting has noted that, quote, adulation of MacArthur was welcome, but the general<\/p>\n

did not brook criticism from the press. One member of the press corps based<\/p>\n

at MacArthur’s headquarters, a man named Frank Jr. Vaizey, later recalled that journalists, quote, could<\/p>\n

not write anything critical of MacArthur’s personality or his acts or anything which<\/p>\n

might indicate that someone, somewhere at some time might disagree with MacArthur.<\/p>\n

I got that out of a Collier’s magazine article. MacArthur’s chief press aide<\/p>\n

was Colonel Diller. And well, these are the these are the men. Colonel<\/p>\n

Diller is right here. That’s the grand he was known as either<\/p>\n

Pich Diller or Killer Diller. He was. He was the closest guy to MacArthur. This fellow<\/p>\n

who really bears a strange resemblance to Herman Gehring is is Bill Dunne,<\/p>\n

who is the CBS reporter and was a chief rival of. Of of a Grantski<\/p>\n

during that year, but that’s a good sense of of Diller with these people. I’ll get<\/p>\n

I’ll get to these other report as well. I can just introduce them briefly. Now, Joe Harsh, who for<\/p>\n

Joe Harsh was in Australia for the exact same amount of time there. Grantski was John Lardner, who wrote for Newsweek<\/p>\n

and was really not a hard news guy. If you want to know what it was like in Australia<\/p>\n

in 1942, not the military side, but the daily life side of things.<\/p>\n

Nobody did it better than John Lardner. He was from the famous Lardner family of writers in<\/p>\n

the United States. So back to the plot here.<\/p>\n

The realities, as I’m suggesting, were pretty different from the promises.<\/p>\n

Even seemingly innocuous information could sometimes face a blue pencil<\/p>\n

from MacArthur’s censors. Let me give you a couple of examples. When a journalist tried to say<\/p>\n

that during a military parade, John Philip Sousa March, Semper Fidelis<\/p>\n

was being played. This is just report that they played Semper Fidelis. The sensor<\/p>\n

lined it out on the grounds that it would indicate to any smart person,<\/p>\n

you know what I’m going to say that it was the Marines. Right.<\/p>\n

So all of the press and I’ll get into some of these other examples that that Bronski specifically<\/p>\n

face and a couple of minutes. Any time you had<\/p>\n

a report on a major military operation, say, the battle of chordal Coral Sea<\/p>\n

in May of 1942. If you’re reading these transcripts or reading the<\/p>\n

accounts, you really don’t know what the heck is going on because the reporters know very little<\/p>\n

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

I’m reading his dispatches in May of 42, I’m thinking, who won this battle? What happened in this battle?<\/p>\n

It doesn’t come through very clearly. MacArthur, of course, wanted it that way.<\/p>\n

He wanted the press to have be fed and watered. He wanted the press to be complicit<\/p>\n

and compliant, but he wasn’t going to feed them information that did anything but help him.<\/p>\n

He saw the press as an adjunct to his work, and that’s one of the reasons he was smart enough to cultivate<\/p>\n

the press. And he wanted them to see things from his perspective. Let me. This is<\/p>\n

later in my talk when I’m going to say it now. MacArthur again<\/p>\n

talked one way, acted another, he says to the reporters in March of 1942, and he meets them.<\/p>\n

He says, I want you to know I’m going to do this relationship without without<\/p>\n

any favoritism to anybody. Nobody gets an exclusive with me. So he walks around a<\/p>\n

table probably about the size of this table. He’s got 30 American reporters in the room.<\/p>\n

He’s honest. He’s chugging on his corncob pipe. Right. And he’s he’s<\/p>\n

he’s a master of the ad lib and he’s a master of responding and spinning things.<\/p>\n

And he tells them you’re all going to be treated exactly the same. He didn’t treat people exactly<\/p>\n

the same. He would call in individual reporters when he served his purposes<\/p>\n

and give them a, quote, exclusive. Now, they couldn’t quote him directly. They would say the highest military source.<\/p>\n

People knew who that was, but he would call them. And then they you know, I<\/p>\n

was a journalist once. I know how this works. When dealing with politicians of a politician is nice to you. You tend to<\/p>\n

be nice back to the politician. And this case, it’s a jerk. It’s it’s a general.<\/p>\n

He gets very good press because these reporters get their so-called exclusives with him, even though he claimed<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And I might add, again, for those interested in Australian history that Thomas Blamey, who is the commander<\/p>\n

on the ground forces and he was an Australian general, Thomas Blamey, hated the press and had a miserable<\/p>\n

relationship with the press. And of course, most famously with Chester Wilmot, one of the greatest reporters of the Second<\/p>\n

World War, who he basically drove out of the Pacific theater to Europe<\/p>\n

because he made up a story about wilmet that made wilmet look bad, which wasn’t true.<\/p>\n

MacArthur didn’t do it that way. MacArthur played the game in a much more subtle and effective<\/p>\n

way. OK. I’ve covered the business about<\/p>\n

MacArthur and the press. Let me turn to consideration of Brown and Grantski, because<\/p>\n

they’re just two great characters that I’ve I’ve really gotten engaged with over the last months.<\/p>\n

Both of them had previously, as I suggested, for Brown, run afoul of censors. Brown,<\/p>\n

in fact, had had been thrown out of Rome before he got thrown out of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.<\/p>\n

Grantski was thrown out of Rome. And one of Gonski’s remarks about it was he published a piece on<\/p>\n

anti-Semitism in in Mussolini’s Italy. And he was told by officials there<\/p>\n

that they could run Italy without his help. And so he was dismissed from<\/p>\n

Italy. So by early, a 40 to Brown is again running into<\/p>\n

trouble with with the authorities in Singapore that the chief British press<\/p>\n

office in Malaya was a man named Sir George Sansone. And he told<\/p>\n

Brown, let’s talk about being straightforward, objective reporting and the local morale<\/p>\n

situation are irreconcilable. So he knew where he was coming<\/p>\n

from. Brown, of course, felt he had another obligation, and that’s why Brown as soon enough kicked out of<\/p>\n

Singapore. There’s a great back story about Brown, of course, that he was the only<\/p>\n

American reporter on a British ship right after Pearl Harbor that was<\/p>\n

sunk, the repulse that was sunk in. And he lives to tell about it.<\/p>\n

And he then winds up when he decides to leave Australia. He then goes and takes this contract<\/p>\n

to write Suez to Singapore, which was a bestseller in the year 1942. And that<\/p>\n

that photograph, of course, is not of him in Australia, but in Egypt, I believe, earlier in the war.<\/p>\n

Brown winds up becoming a commentator for CBS Radio, has a<\/p>\n

long career right into the 1960s, but again, kind of disappears from our consciousness,<\/p>\n

even though he was a top dog at the time. I do want to say one more thing about Brown.<\/p>\n

In February of 42, about the time that Brown was going to the riving in Australia,<\/p>\n

he gets called by Life magazine and they want him to write an article. About what’s the<\/p>\n

deal in Australia? What can you say that Americans need to know about Australia? And he writes<\/p>\n

this piece and it’s called the Australians and it appeared in Life magazine in June of 1942.<\/p>\n

It’s a it’s an interesting piece because it kind of goes in different directions. On<\/p>\n

the one hand, the Australians are great people. They’ve got a great character. They’re terrific fighters.<\/p>\n

There are allies by blood. They’re our allies, by by ideology, their allies and belief<\/p>\n

and in our democracy and all of that. But then he also screws through it<\/p>\n

some fairly tough reporting about how Australian workers,<\/p>\n

particularly dock workers, were not doing their jobs and how they were working very<\/p>\n

short hours and taking lots of breaks. And the Japanese, as he says in the article, they’re not<\/p>\n

working 30 hours a week. They’re working 70 hours a week. This is a problem, he says.<\/p>\n

Well, this infuriated the tempestuous foreign minister of Australia, a guy named<\/p>\n

h.v. Evatt, who who penned a very sharp rebuttal<\/p>\n

to Brown, even though what Brown had said was absolutely true and send it off to Life<\/p>\n

magazine. And I thought it was interesting. It probably went right up to Henry Luce. The article<\/p>\n

appeared in June of 1943. Everts rebuttal was written in late June 43.<\/p>\n

The the the letter to the editor was published in March. Of<\/p>\n

that was 42 with a letter to the editor was published in March of 43. So it took nine months<\/p>\n

for for The Life magazine to publish the letter to the editor. Talk about burying it right<\/p>\n

now. Grantski a Grantski had stuck up for Brown. You know, this isn’t a<\/p>\n

case where you have a rival in the journalistic world and you sort of<\/p>\n

have a shayden for it that the person’s in trouble, right? A Kreisky went right at the censors<\/p>\n

and said Brown has done nothing wrong. He’s always played by the rulebook. He’s giving honest<\/p>\n

reporting. And he has never broken any of his responsible actions<\/p>\n

in terms of censor showing his material to censors. He’s just fighting with you to get his stories<\/p>\n

through. And that made, of course, a friend for life with him with Cecil Brown.<\/p>\n

A Grantski himself makes a big splash<\/p>\n

early in his visit to Australia in February of forty two. And<\/p>\n

I’m going to come back to this at the end, because it gets him kicked out of or gets him prevented from<\/p>\n

covering the war further in Australia. There was an event that happened where bad<\/p>\n

shells in the American navy and bad direction had prevented<\/p>\n

a an effective response to a Japanese attack in the Dutch East Indies.<\/p>\n

And he reports this and it makes the front page of The New York Times. What he does not know, even though<\/p>\n

nothing happens to him immediately, is that the Navy has filed this away<\/p>\n

as this guy is bad news and we’re gonna get him. And they do.<\/p>\n

Now, he does continue to report for the next six months, and these are the crucial six months as far as Australians<\/p>\n

are concerned. What is his what is he doing as a reporter? Well, he’s filing<\/p>\n

twice a day, morning and evening, at least five days a week. And he’s writing<\/p>\n

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

in a minute or so. Grantski.<\/p>\n

Does not make himself out to be Peck’s bad boy of journalism.<\/p>\n

He tells the story the way MacArthur wanted told. We have a war to win in<\/p>\n

the Pacific theater. We don’t have the resources to do what we need to do to win that war.<\/p>\n

We have a great general and Douglas MacArthur. We’ve got to give him the tools to work with. So in that<\/p>\n

sense, A, Grantski is doing exactly what the spin meister himself would want<\/p>\n

a Grantski to do. He talks about<\/p>\n

the great resolve of the air power<\/p>\n

in Australia and the United States. The pilots specifically and how they’re going up and they’re doing the job<\/p>\n

for the country. One of his feel good stories, which is a periodic story that he<\/p>\n

interweaves into his his broadcasts, is interviewing pilots and getting them to<\/p>\n

unpack a particular flight that they did and making the reader or the listener in this case<\/p>\n

feel like that they were there with the pilots. He quotes h.v. Evatt himself<\/p>\n

as saying at one point that if we did not provide more support for the Australians<\/p>\n

militarily and with munitions, there might not be in Australia to come back to.<\/p>\n

And interestingly enough, that was censored by the Australian the Australian<\/p>\n

press censors. Now, what do you deal with<\/p>\n

in terms of Australian censorship? You deal with people who are pretty hard core.<\/p>\n

This first is a Grantski talking about a free press. And it’s interesting that his comments about<\/p>\n

a free press are printed in an Australian newspaper in which he’s making the case<\/p>\n

that, you know, in every country that goes to the access, people don’t know the truth. We have<\/p>\n

to tell the truth. The press has a job to tell the government of the temper and the conditions, the people, etc.<\/p>\n

That’s that appears in an Australian paper. But then he has to run in first with Killer Diller.<\/p>\n

Right. Who is a thorn in his and other reporters sides. And then this<\/p>\n

fella, Edmund Garnett. Barney and I want to say a couple of words about Barney. He was<\/p>\n

a former editorial writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and he was appointed chief censor for Australia<\/p>\n

in April of 1941. His reputation was for the most<\/p>\n

expansive possible interpretation of what could be censored, especially<\/p>\n

for overseas press reports. He he he not only censored<\/p>\n

military information, but anything that might affect Australia’s reputation in the United<\/p>\n

States. Anything that might make Australia look is anything other than an effective and<\/p>\n

willing partner of the Americans would not get through. Author Robert Bell argues<\/p>\n

that as a result of this, the impact of Australian censors was to make the Australian<\/p>\n

press behave more like a propaganda arm of the government than a genuine free agent.<\/p>\n

But what I like and I’m going to share with you now is what his own staff said about<\/p>\n

Barney. They offered a ditty, My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie<\/p>\n

lies over the sea, and sometimes I get the notion, my Bonnie lies also to me.<\/p>\n

There there is again, Diller leading the pack of American journalists, including<\/p>\n

by my friend Bill Dunn, carrying a koala bear. Right. It’s a great it’s a great piece.<\/p>\n

I Grantski is unfortunately not in this particular<\/p>\n

picture. And and Brown had already left. But this fellow right here might be worth noting, because<\/p>\n

some of you will know about his children. This is Byron, Barney, Darnton.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

in the Pacific. Gartin goes over in the first among the first landings<\/p>\n

in New Guinea in the fall of 19 September of 1942. And he is killed<\/p>\n

by friendly fire. And it was it was a horrible thing. The reason<\/p>\n

I mentioned it, some of you know about his kids is that some of you may have heard of Robert<\/p>\n

or John daughton. They were both very small. Robert Darnton, the Princeton<\/p>\n

professor and director of the Harvard University Library, a great French<\/p>\n

historian. John Darnton, New York Times reporter, prize winner for many years. I<\/p>\n

think that Robert was four years old and John was a year and a half when their father was killed in the war.<\/p>\n

So this is this is not beanbag. This is serious stuff. Now,<\/p>\n

as far as dealing with censor’s go, this is a hard thing to know, absent being able<\/p>\n

to interview someone who served as a journalist in Australia at the time. How much<\/p>\n

cat and mouse did they play? How much self-censorship were they engaged in? How much did<\/p>\n

they sneak things through? How much did they just count on their relationship building with sensors<\/p>\n

to enable them to get more in? They might not might otherwise get.<\/p>\n

I’ll tell you right now that one of my I would say instincts in reading<\/p>\n

these these transcripts very closely is that in many cases<\/p>\n

you do see blue pencil. And I’m gonna show you the blue pencil in a second. But you also notice<\/p>\n

that the senses are acting as copy editors, because you can see<\/p>\n

they see that a better word could be used to describe something. And you see the blue pencil<\/p>\n

with the better word. So I think there’s a I wouldn’t call it a symbiotic relationship because that doesn’t seem<\/p>\n

right. But there is a relationship that goes on when you’re working with the same sensors<\/p>\n

over a period of months. And in some cases, the sensors are trying to help you, not just toward you.<\/p>\n

And I think that, again, adds to what we were talking about. I was talking about with Rhonda before about the need<\/p>\n

for complexity in in working with our students and getting the word out to our students about<\/p>\n

what the issue is in any given case. So I’ve just talked<\/p>\n

about reviewing some of these transcripts. Let me tell you about some of the things that he couldn’t get through.<\/p>\n

He couldn’t talk about any thing that was pessimistic about where the allies<\/p>\n

stood in relation to the war. He couldn’t talk about fifth columnists, organisations<\/p>\n

in Australia that had been unearthed. He couldn’t talk about labor disputes<\/p>\n

at all. He couldn’t publish information that he got<\/p>\n

from cabinet officers about troubles that they were having. Whether it was logistics or militarily,<\/p>\n

he couldn’t talk about the coal situation in Australia. All of this stuff when he tried to write about it<\/p>\n

was blue penciled when he when he reported about the disappointing<\/p>\n

results of a Liberty loan campaign in 1942. Again, blue pencil. But here’s my favorite<\/p>\n

in the summer of 42. He goes, he travels, and I think he’s in Brisbane.<\/p>\n

And he writes an account of a woman I in Newcastle. He writes an account of<\/p>\n

a woman customer in a Newcastle store in a scrum of, quote,<\/p>\n

clothes hungry shoppers who bit a shop employee blocking her rush to the bargain<\/p>\n

bins. And he can’t publish that either.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

I’ve said actually matters. And I think the answer that I would offer has<\/p>\n

to be viewed amid admittedly a subjective I would say that the censorship<\/p>\n

that that GROSKIN is peers dealt with was annoying, but it was a price that<\/p>\n

they were more than willing to pay. They were Americans. They were patriots. They wanted the<\/p>\n

the war effort to go well. I’m also struck by how much<\/p>\n

interesting and valuable information the listener on NBC Radio to a Grantski or<\/p>\n

to CBS of Bill Dunn, who wrote in a much less dramatic way than a Grantski did. I’m<\/p>\n

interested. I would say they got a pretty good sense of it now. In the case of a Grantski,<\/p>\n

I would say that it wasn’t so much that he slanted the news to get through the centers as he<\/p>\n

highlighted situations that he himself believed to be true. So, for example, he believed<\/p>\n

that MacArthur was the key man and that we needed to give MacArthur more authority in the Pacific war, that<\/p>\n

we need to give MacArthur more resources, or we couldn’t possibly be successful. That’s not a case<\/p>\n

of him running against any grain. It’s what he believed. And I think that would be true<\/p>\n

of of his computers as well. Now, he did,<\/p>\n

as I say, occasionally punctuate the hard news stuff with softer news about<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

of Australian coffee or what they think of other pieces of the Australian diet.<\/p>\n

And of course, the Americans were always tell them that they wanted what they were used to back in the United States.<\/p>\n

And please get me that if you can. And some people then would send it. Some of his<\/p>\n

his reporting had a kind of gee whiz, how impressive was that element to it? And that was when<\/p>\n

he would introduce pilots to the American audience. He really<\/p>\n

wanted to have a feel good element in his reporting, too. And and that was part of the reality<\/p>\n

of it. Now, I’m going to close or bring us toward the close here<\/p>\n

with how a Grantski falls a foul. And it relates to what I said to you about<\/p>\n

February of 1942. There’s Bonnie. These are this is a<\/p>\n

well, I’ll take a second here. This is a typical dispatch that I’m reading in the Library of Congress.<\/p>\n

And the blew up there is the censors. I think the brown is the coffee spilling.<\/p>\n

But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I’m gonna show you three three examples<\/p>\n

of a dispatch with with a good deal of blue penciling. These are the other two. Right.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to give you the impression that this. Every day there are dispatches where only<\/p>\n

that’s only a word or two is deleted or changed. But<\/p>\n

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

maybe, but generally he went along with it because he knew he wanted to live to fight another day.<\/p>\n

So that that will give you some idea from May of 42. And that’s just when we’re getting to the Battle<\/p>\n

of Coral Sea. Here’s one more. July 26, 1942. You can see very clearly<\/p>\n

the blue lines. If you really want to study, you can see exactly what was problematic from the sensors point of view.<\/p>\n

Notice in the upper right hand corner, every single transcript has that, because<\/p>\n

otherwise it doesn’t get through. It doesn’t get recorded. So what happens to mess<\/p>\n

things up for Gonski? Well, literally, the<\/p>\n

week he arrives, bom wacky as it was said from the Dutch East Indies,<\/p>\n

he tells his story to his listeners about this<\/p>\n

Japanese air patrol and this fight in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean on February<\/p>\n

and what it was likely to do next. Emphasizing how poorly the British were prepared to<\/p>\n

fight in Singapore, this becomes the basis for<\/p>\n

his scoop. Here’s some bad news. And it’s the truth, he says.<\/p>\n

To start with, it is painfully clear that the allied nations, unless their policy changes immediately,<\/p>\n

are in serious danger of complete defeat in eastern and Western Asia.<\/p>\n

And then he referred to a, quote, first class Jap Army, Navy and Air Force led by<\/p>\n

decisive commanders, which he said contrasted to an allied command that was consistently<\/p>\n

dealing with internal squabbles over authority. And then he says<\/p>\n

that Americans needed to face up to the fact that they hadn’t done much to<\/p>\n

alter the balance of power in the war. As of February. But it gets worse<\/p>\n

in on February the 23rd. He broadcasts from Sydney about<\/p>\n

this military attack against 32 Japanese bombers and how<\/p>\n

futile it was. Why was it futile? Because, he says.<\/p>\n

The ship’s antiaircraft ammunition was more than a decade ago, and 70 percent of<\/p>\n

the shells that the men tried to fire were duds and that the antiaircraft<\/p>\n

guns targeting Japanese planes could not do so with any accuracy because the material<\/p>\n

they were working with was defective. He also tells about RAAF pilots trying to<\/p>\n

enter the fight in Singapore who were told they had no orders to do it and that they should return to base<\/p>\n

in Java for further instructions. This is what comes out of that broadcast.<\/p>\n

His scoop? Allied ineptitude in the Pacific. You can imagine what Frank Knox,<\/p>\n

the secretary of the Navy, thought when he read this. Here you go, the follow up. This<\/p>\n

is The New York Times. The front page. Right. Defective shells charged to Navy and far<\/p>\n

convoy protection. Now, what’s surprising to me is that a Grantski wasn’t immediately slapped down<\/p>\n

for I don’t really know the answer to that. But what happens in August of 1942<\/p>\n

is he has been going for three years in a row and he is worn down emotionally<\/p>\n

as well as physically. He’s at the end of his rope. He needs to get some R&R.<\/p>\n

He decides he wants to go back to the United States, figuring that there was going to be an offensive in<\/p>\n

New Guinea in September. He had his the word out about that. He’ll take a couple of months. He’ll get<\/p>\n

his mojo back, and then he’ll go back into the reporting. Guess what<\/p>\n

goes back to the US. He’d already irritated as Brown had his producers by being as tough<\/p>\n

as he was. They told him to ratchet it back. And of course, he didn’t want to.<\/p>\n

The key thing for a Grantski is he has to get re credited to go back to the<\/p>\n

military theater and the Navy will not give him his accreditation. He doesn’t know this.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

through. So one month goes by. Two, three, four. In December 42.<\/p>\n

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

to to go back, because an American army nurse is waiting for him in Australia<\/p>\n

and he is going crazy. And you off your shorts have to read his letters to know all the details about<\/p>\n

that. But he uses a contact he has<\/p>\n

in the Air Force general named Ralph Royce to get actually an interview with the<\/p>\n

Navy secretary, who I think I have for you here. Frank Knox.<\/p>\n

And so he finally gets to go because he get no answers about why he can’t get back to Australia. He<\/p>\n

could finally gets an audience with Frank Knox in December of 1942. And he figures<\/p>\n

that one on one who persuade Knox and Knox says you’re a troublemaker.<\/p>\n

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

for you because you have a reputation. And of course, the accreditation never materializes.<\/p>\n

And A Grantski winds up going on a lecture tour. He doesn’t write a book, but he he gets himself<\/p>\n

a contract with the Blue Network, which is a precursor of ABC to be a commentator fruit for<\/p>\n

them. So let me close. And<\/p>\n

by the way, he does eventually get back together with Helen Smathers,<\/p>\n

who is the woman that he fell in love with in Australia, marries and has kids. And<\/p>\n

it was for them a happily ever after until she was killed in a fire. Some years later,<\/p>\n

this is him on his lecture tour as he comes back to the states. So summing up,<\/p>\n

what do you make of all of this? I think I make that these these reporters did a<\/p>\n

as good a job as they could do under difficult circumstances. They recognise the limits they were under.<\/p>\n

They work with them. In some cases, they work around them. Whether we’re talking<\/p>\n

about a Grantski Brown, Lewis Sebring of The New York Herald Tribune, John Lardner,<\/p>\n

Barney Darnton, George Weller. These guys were first class correspondents, Joe Harsh<\/p>\n

in the end and the others in the process of covering the Pacific War. They<\/p>\n

didn’t lighten the listening public back home and the reading public. They helped shape policymakers<\/p>\n

understanding of what was going on in this vitally important theater. And by and large,<\/p>\n

they made sense. And I’ll stop right there. Thank you.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/409\/facts-censorship-and-spin-covering-the-pacific-war-from-australia-1942.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/409\/facts-censorship-and-spin-covering-the-pacific-war-from-australia-1942.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/409\/facts-censorship-and-spin-covering-the-pacific-war-from-australia-1942.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/feed\/podcast\/bsls","embedCode":"

Facts, Censorship, and Spin: Covering the Pacific War from Australia, 1942<\/a><\/blockquote>