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After more than 130 years, the fundamental dispute between the American media and the American military has changed hardly at all. The essential argument is still about access. How much should the press be allowed to know and see of the conduct of battle? Access was the question posed by the eighteen hundred media personnel accredited to cover Operation Desert Storm in Iraq when fewer than three hundred were permitted onto the field in press pools so carefully escorted and monitored that one correspondent likened them to “excursion tours for senior citizens.”

Access was all Florus Plympton of the Cincinnati Commercial wanted in September 1861 when he arrived at Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s command in Kentucky with a sheaf of letters of introduction from Sherman’s military superiors and a request for an interview. Sherman, who hated the press with a devouring flame, ordered the newsman to take the next train back to Louisville. When Plympton protested that he had come only to learn the truth, Sherman flew into a fine rage. “We don’t want the truth told about things here,” Sherman exploded. ”… We don’t want the enemy any better informed than he is.”

With varying degrees of acrimony, that conversation has been going on ever since. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the victor in the Persian Gulf, claims an affection for the writings of Sherman, and several times during the Gulf War he quoted the old general more aptly and accurately than many military historians have. More important, Schwarzkopf and his forces paid honor to Sherman’s memory not only by conducting a flanking action reminiscent of Sherman at his best but by accomplishing something Sherman never did. Thanks to careful planning and meticulous execution, as well as the kind of good luck that goes with such planning and execution, they managed to control the press to a degree not seen in our history. With few meaningful exceptions, the words and the pictures were entirely those approved by the military command.

If the media were as well disciplined and given to conducting extensive critiques of their performance as the military is, there would be a large group of high-level news personnel huddled around a sand table at the Columbia Journalism School right now, rerunning the exercise and trying to discover what went wrong. It is important to find out, for while an unfettered press may sometimes be nettlesome, a tame, obedient press is always dangerous. If ever there was an object lesson in this, it was demonstrated by Saddam Hussein, who, immediately after the cease-fire, threw foreign journalists out of Iraq so he could go back to slaughtering his own people without letting them read about it in the papers.

It is not in their natures for the military and the media to be entirely comfortable with each other. The disciplines are too disparate. The military requires subservience of the individual to the needs of the group, while the media prize independent initiative above all else. The same elements that make a good reporter would likely make for a poor field commander. At their best the media and the military work together in roughhewn harmony, providing sound military leadership and an independent source of information that helps the public (which provides the troops and pays the bills) to know what it’s getting for its expenditure of blood and money. At their worst the military wraps itself in the flag and the media wrap themselves in the First Amendment and neither party listens to the other.

It is unfortunate that the two sides of the issue were first so spectacularly joined by Sherman and the press. This inaugural confrontation shows neither side at its most admirable. No American military leader in our history has ever been as malevolently and unfairly vilified in the newspapers as Sherman was by the Northern press. They said he was insane in 1861, and the suspicion of madness clung to him for the rest of the war. They said he was a coward for refusing to commit his troops to frontal assaults, and when he did try a bloody charge up Kennesaw Mountain, they accused him of wasting his men for personal glory. After the assassination of President Lincoln they said he was trying to become the man on horseback eager to seize control of the government. They charged him with treason and treachery, and one newspaper ran a story saying Sherman had been secretly paid off in Confederate gold to let Jefferson Davis escape to Mexico. Even taking into account the rough-andtumble mores of the press at the time, the charges were scurrilous.

Reason enough for Sherman to hate the press, but his detestation of the media went deeper than hurt feelings over personal attacks. In 1855, when he was a partner in a San Francisco bank, Sherman had gone to the local newspapers to ask them to stop printing inflammatory articles on the wobbly economics of Northern California and was coldly refused. That the press would risk possible financial panic to pursue some quixotic search for truth struck Sherman as irresponsible. Also, the very development of the popular press in the nineteenth century was part of a democratic tide that terrified the general, who admitted to being something very close to a monarchist. He saw the rise of landless mechanics, freed blacks, and the penny press, with its ideas that one man’s vote was as good as anyone else’s, as an invitation to civic chaos. He couldn’t do much about the mechanics because they were shouldering weapons in his army, and he held off the blacks at more than arm’s length by trying to restrict their participation in the Western theater to work in labor battalions. He could get at the press, however, and he attacked it vigorously, describing correspondents as a “set of dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.” He routinely banished reporters from his command, had several of them arrested, and stood ready to order up the firing squad when he could get one of them in his sights.

In truth, the press did not draw from the elevated levels of society. Henry Adams said he went into journalism as “the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism.” It should be remembered, however, that as the troops, freshly levied from farm and factory, had to learn how to be soldiers, so a large body of newspaper reporters had to learn how to cover a war.

American newspapers had eagerly reported the progress of the Mexican War fifteen years earlier. This was the first conflict to field war correspondents, but news they gathered took so long to get from the distant desert armies that it could scarcely offer any help to Santa Anna by the time it reached the headlines. Most of the Civil War, on the other hand, would be fought out close to a telegraph key. And it was a civil war: to an extent, the more serious lapses of the men who covered it had to reflect the uncertainties and terrible cross-purposes of the time.

There were some grave breaches of security. Sherman was forced to fight a battle he had hoped to avoid at Goldsboro when the Confederate general William Hardee read in the New York Tribune that that was where the Yankees were heading. “It’s impossible,” Sherman told his staff, “to carry on a war with a free press.” Surprisingly, some of the press agreed with him. Henry Villard, a distinguished correspondent and editor, allowed that “if I were a commanding general, I would not tolerate any of the tribe within my army lines.”

It was pointed out at the time that Sherman may have also hated the press because he was “too much like them to love them.” Sherman wrote supremely well and could have been a media star earning considerably more than his general’s pay had he switched professions. Worse even than being a mere newspaper scribbler, Sherman was a natural-born publicity peddler. When he telegraphed Washington in September 1864, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” he showed he knew something of how to fashion a headline, and four months later, when he wired President Lincoln offering him the city of Savannah as a Christmas present, he delivered a masterstroke in public relations.

In an irony of history, Sherman, who was so pilloried in the press, may have also been a chief beneficiary. When he was girding up for his march, newspaper stories about a lunatic Union general coming South with a torch to set fire to the Confederacy struck precisely the note that the general wished to be sounded. Southerners, he said, “entertained an undue fear of our western men, and, like children, they had invented such ghost-like stories of our own prowess in Georgia they were scared by their own inventions.”

Freedom of the press as guaranteed by the Constitution is a particularly American concept. While the American press is not impervious to control or attack, it is afforded legal protections not available elsewhere. During World War I, Winston Churchill seriously suggested that The Times of London be commandeered and turned into an official government publication, to be used as “a sure and authoritative means of guiding public opinion.”

By this time the press had become an unpleasant fact of life for the military. If correspondents could not be kept off the field, however, it was essential they be controlled. The British press and army censors acted in concert to keep the horrors of trench warfare out of news accounts. Late in December 1917 Prime Minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If the people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

As before, American correspondents, who arrived overseas after posting ten-thousand-dollar bonds to ensure their deportment, had to concern themselves with access. The United Press’s Westbrook Pegler, twenty-three years old and the youngest accredited reporter in France, tried to get an interview with the American commander, Gen. John J. Pershing. The interview consisted in its entirety of Pershing’s saying, “Pegler, get the hell out of my office.”

There was much news to sit on during the war, and the military fell into the practice of restricting information on the basis of the security of the troops when the question was really about the comfort of the commanders. Pegler tried to break a story about the number of American soldiers dying of pneumonia because of inadequate supplies of heat and clothing. Pershing wrote the United Press saying Regler was too young to understand the uses of war and asking that he be replaced. He was.

Correspondents were expected not simply to report the war but to be part of the public relations team supporting its execution. Frederick Palmer, a veteran war reporter for three American news agencies, later said he was “cast for the part of a public liar to keep up the spirits of the armies and the peoples of our side.” In an interesting parallel to Peter Arnett’s reportage from Baghdad for CNN, Palmer, for a time, went to Berlin and reported from there. Since just about everyone has made some kind of remark concerning the propriety of Arnett’s telecasting from the enemy capital, I might as well throw in mine. Arnett was doing what every good reporter tries to do. He got as close to the story as he could and reported it as well as he could under trying conditions. I cannot imagine there was a American war correspondent in Europe during World War II who would not have reported from Berlin if he could have gotten there.

Palmer later turned down a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year job as a war correspondent to become chief censor for the American forces for a major’s pay of twenty-four hundred dollars. He’d had more combat exposure than any officer in the American Expeditionary Forces, having covered a number of conflicts, including the Greek-Turkish War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine insurrection, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, and the American incursion into Mexico. But trying to organize and discipline the unruly American press corps, he found, “was worse than war.”

The press did not become noticeably warmer to the military in the months and years after the 1918 armistice, but the immense unifying shock of Pearl Harbor changed that along with everything else. America had never entered a war with such a sense of common purpose. The years between 1941 and 1945 represented the high-water mark of cooperation between the military and the media, and the two worked together as closely as they ever were likely to do. It started at the top. The Army’s chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, one of the most close-mouthed men in American military history, routinely briefed top members of the Washington press corps, giving them the latest war information with the bark on it. The sessions were for background only, but the reporters gained valuable insight into the conduct of the war. Ten days before the invasion of Sicily, Gen. Dwight Elsenhower filled in some thirty American reporters on the assault planning down to identifying the specific divisions scheduled to hit the beaches. The press justified the confidence. There were no security breaches at any of these top-secret conferences, and as the invasion progressed, the field reporters in Sicily agreed, at Elsenhower’s personal request, to sit on the most colorful story of the campaign: the famous slapping incident when Gen. George Patton struck a soldier said to be suffering from shell shock. The story was later broken in Washington by Drew Pearson, a popular political gossip columnist, who was not privy to the agreement made in Sicily.

The same spirit held through the Korean War. Members of the press were briefed several days ahead of the spectacular surprise amphibious landing at Inchon. Like a great many things in American life, cooperation between the military and the media began to unravel in Vietnam. Here, as in the Civil War a century earlier, America found itself deeply and violently divided about its national purpose. The correspondent John Chancellor put succinctly the lesson of those years: “Relations between the press and the American military deteriorated when the United States began to engage in undeclared wars of uncertain popularity.” Of all the myths of our times, none is more pervasive than the one deeply held within some levels of the military that “the press lost Vietnam.” This is simple nonsense. Even though military censorship did not officially exist in Vietnam (in an undeclared war, there was no legal basis for it), there is no record of any operation compromised as a result of press coverage. Out of more than two thousand sets of press credentials issued during Vietnam, six were revoked for damage to military security.

The most famous revocation came in 1968, when John S. Carroll, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote that the Marines were abandoning Khe Sanh near the Laotian and North Vietnamese borders. The Khe Sanh facility had been a dubious military property for some time. Stuck on the outer fringes of Vietnam, it had been under periodic siege, and President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers in Washington became convinced the North Vietnamese wanted to turn Khe Sanh into another Dien Bien Phu, the citadel of French colonial power that fell to North Vietnamese attack in 1954. Under pressure from Washington, the commanding general, William C. Westmoreland, called for massive air and artillery bombardment throughout January and February to lift the siege. Four months after staging a major action in defense of Khe Sanh, the command decided to pull out. Carroll, who had covered the strikes in January, returned in June to see the metal runway being scrapped, the bunkers blown up, and the facilities bulldozed. For reporting what every Vietcong within ten miles could see and hear for himself, Carroll lost his accreditation for six weeks. Political embarrassment at home was beginning to count for as much as military concerns in the field.

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