Fit to Print
A hero to some, a goat to others, Edward Kennedy scored the scoop of the century at the end of WWII
By Joe Livernois
EDWARD KENNEDY, the hardboiled war correspondent, scored the greatest scoop of the century — and it cost him dearly. He broke the news that World War II had ended in Europe, but he released the account of Germany’s humiliating surrender a day before the world’s triumphant leaders wanted the world to hear the news. And, boy, were they ever pissed when he found a way around their censorship.
Kennedy witnessed the surrender ceremony in a schoolhouse in Reims, France, along with a handful of other select journalists. All were instructed to withhold the news for 36 hours to appease the Russians. But Kennedy foiled military censors, and he dashed off the good news to his editors at Associated Press.
And because he gifted the world an extra day of peace, he found himself at the center of one of the great controversies in journalism history.
Kennedy had earned a spot in Reims honestly. Working for AP, he had become one of the world’s most respected war correspondents in Europe, with experience dating back to the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He was admired with jealousy by his colleagues for his clever ability to confound the meddling military censors. He detested the stories spoon-fed by the military PR machine to control the war’s narrative, and he worked his sources to get the actual truth.
Kennedy had witnessed conflicts in forests, jungles, cities and deserts. He experiences gave him an encyclopedic knowledge of foreign affairs in a world gone mad. And he nurtured the drinking habits that distinguished the top-notch journalists of the era.
He was a cocky correspondent, proud of his work and his ability to dig up stories no one else could get. In his own words, he claimed to have made “many more scoops than any other war correspondent. That statement may seem boastful and may be challenged, but I think that an examination of newspaper files would bear it out.”
And on May 7, 1945, Kennedy managed to send the biggest scoop of his career, a 300-word dispatch to London’s AP office declaring the war was officially over.
Ed Kennedy had been a witness to this bit of history, watched a German general sign the surrender document that ended the war in Europe. It was a transformational historic event that Kennedy believed should be shared with the world immediately. But, for political reasons, military brass demanded that the news remain a secret for at least 36 hours.
“The absurdity of attempting to bottle up news of this magnitude was too apparent,” Kennedy would say years later. “I knew from experience that one might as well try to censor the rising of the sun.”
He risked possible imprisonment — unlikely, but possible — by senior military officers who were furious that they had lost control of the narrative, that Kennedy had outwitted them again. His fellow correspondents were also outraged; he was snubbed, humiliated and blackballed by the competition he scooped. But among readers and some newspaper editors back home, he was hailed as a hero. For managers at the Associated Press, Kennedy had become a vexing problem to solve.
After the controversy of his scoop died down, he ended up in the relatively obscure journalistic backwater that is Monterey. He worked at the Monterey Peninsula Herald; he was a local legend and all-around good guy, a worthy character in an area crawling with local color.
I FIRST RAN ACROSS Edward Kennedy’s saga in a college journalism textbook, “A Treasury of Great Reporting.” According to the textbook editors, Kennedy’s end-of-war dispatch was a pedestrian account dispatched in plain language. But what made it important was the happy news announcing the end of a bloody global conflict. Because of it, according to my textbook, “Kennedy incurred the wrath of the headquarters bureaucracy and of correspondents beaten on the story. On the other hand, he won overwhelming commendation at home, where the people felt that they had the right to know the news.”
Kennedy willfully violated military orders after weighing those orders against the principles of honest truth.
Kennedy’s story inspired me. In the midst of what must have been an exceptionally unsettling time, under the watchful eye of Big-Brother censors, Kennedy managed to break the story that may have saved lives on the battlefield; it allowed the Allies to celebrate one day earlier. He was — and remains — a hero.
A couple of years after my college days, I spent a happy six months on the “rim” at the copy desk at The Herald. I listened carefully to the stories of old Monterey, shared by the great Herald old-time journalists. They were the guys who drank cheap wine with the likes of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, played cards with the local fishermen, and relied on waterfront prostitutes for the straight scoop. They always spoke with admiration about Edward Kennedy. They spoke of his place in Monterey lore, and they argued about the circumstances of his famous World War II scoop.
During lunch breaks at The Herald, I would cozy up to the microfilm machine in the newsroom morgue to research the work Kennedy did locally, when he was associate editor and publisher of The Herald. His reputation was that of a great war correspondents, but he had settled into this small town. In his old clips, I saw that he had settled in as an avuncular presence in the community, waxing eloquently about the important issues of the day in front-page columns he signed “E.K.”
And from the microfilm machine I learned that, on the day that Jack Ruby shot assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Edward Kennedy had been struck by a vehicle at a Monterey intersection. He died of his injuries a couple of days later. His death was big news, earning extensive write-ups in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.
This had all happened in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy (who was not related). With the deaths of both the president and its beloved editor, the Monterey Peninsula Herald’s front pages were filled with news of dead Kennedys for several days.
Late City Edition
KENNEDY HAD THE TOUGHEST JOB in journalism, dodging bombs and cutting through the nationalistic rhetoric of warmongers. But he had grown up tough, born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in 1905. He was a bright, inquisitive kid in a family unable to put him through college. He took a job as a reporter out of high school for the Syracuse Journal, and saved enough money to sail to Paris, where he studied French. He bounced back and forth between the two continents, working or stringing for newspapers in the United States while enjoying Europe. He ended up at the Associated Press and was assigned to the Paris bureau in 1935. Continental turmoil was all the rage back then, and it remained that way for his decade abroad.
Over the years as a war correspondent he developed a healthy skepticism, always a natural reaction to being spoonfed endless fabrications by government poseurs, liberators, commanders, politicians and other liars. He spent a year in Spain, covering the war and the tyrant Gen. Francisco Franco. It was, he wrote later, “a grim task … The year I spent in Spain was a struggle, against all odds, to write objectively, to give as true a picture as I could of what was happening and to avoid the omnipresent propaganda.”
If Franco had been a struggle, Kennedy was then sent to Italy to cover Benito Mussolini. He got a first-hand look at the Fascist movement and at Italy’s puzzling involvement in the civil war in Spain. He was galled by what he witnessed. “The trappings of Fascism had the grand opera glitter that Italians love so much,” he wrote later, in his memoir. More than 30 foreign correspondents had been expelled from Italy for writing truth that offended the Propaganda Office, but Kennedy managed to talk his way out of the trouble he constantly found himself in with Mussolini’s censors.
He watched with horror when Hitler visited Rome in the spring of 1938 to cement an alliance of anti-Semitism and a little-disguised plot to rule the civilized world. Later that year, Kennedy found himself in Germany “to see how the other half of the Axis lived” and reported on the demonic spell Hitler had over the poverty-stricken citizens of Sudetenland. It was there that Kennedy experienced the grip Hitler had on the German population. To a growing number of citizens, Hitler was “Siegfried after having slain another dragon, he was the Avenging Angel, the People’s Liberator, and the Spirit of Germany all rolled into one.”
He covered World War II from outposts in Europe, the Mideast and Africa, beating his colleagues with scoops and foiling censors every step of the way.
As much as possible, he avoided the military versions of accounts forced upon him by public relations men. “The reporting of World War II was at its worst, in my opinion, in the so-called Headquarters Story,” he complained in his memoir. “This was the daily overall picture of what was happening in the Theater, as woven together from the communiqués, the flood of Army handouts, and the vocal emanations of the official spokesmen … As the war progressed, the public relations machinery for providing information for the headquarters story grew greater and more elaborate.”
Kennedy had been around long enough to recognize that the Allied propaganda “machinery” was no better than what he was seeing from the two-bit totalitarian states. “Public relations journalism was cramped by the hand of officialdom and scarcely distinguishable from the war reporting in the Fascist and Nazi press,” he wrote.
AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE of totalitarianism and agonizing war, after Hitler had put a bullet into his own brain in late April 1945 and it was clear that the evil German Empire was about to collapse, war correspondents knew surrender was imminent. Many of them were working out of the Hotel Scribe in Paris, which also served as the operational center for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Known as SHAEF, the military command center employed some of WWII’s most accomplished and despised military censors.
The Scribe was the hangout in Paris for years, populated by reporters, novelists, poets, demagogues and other colorful weirdos. Lyn Crost, another war correspondent, first encountered Kennedy at the hotel bar, where she found him chatting with Ernest Hemingway. “They were dead drunk and could hardly stand up,” Crost later said. Crost worked briefly with Kennedy in Paris, then married him after the war.
In early May of 1945, as the war was wrapping up, SHAEF brass dusted off an old strategic planning document it had devised for handling the press during any future surrender ceremony. The document was code-named “Operation Jackplane.” Among other things, Operation Jackplane established the rules of engagement for reporters witnessing surrender ceremonies under embargoed conditions.
On the morning of May 6, Kennedy was awakened in his hotel room by a representative of the military PR machinery. He was only told he would be flown to an undisclosed location to report on an undisclosed event. He and 16 other correspondents were taken to a small airfield outside Paris, where they met Brig. Gen. Frank Allen. The reporters were selected based on the reach of the audience their news agencies served. AP and United Press International was on the list. So was Life magazine. It wasn’t until the plane was off the ground that Allen told Kennedy and the others where they were going and what they’d be witnessing.
Depending on the differing accounts of what else was said inside the noisy transport aircraft that morning, Allen might have sworn the correspondents to secrecy and had them promise not to violate a 36-hour embargo on the news. But Kennedy didn’t remember it that way. Kennedy later said he didn’t hear Allen seek a pledge from anyone to keep the news quiet; rather, he heard Allen simply ask whether everyone understood the story would be held for a while.
Most the reporters willingly agreed, but Kennedy naturally harbored doubts about the military’s intentions, and worried about the ethics of withholding news of such an important event. “I did not attach special significance to the ‘pledge’ regarding the release, and the other correspondents gave no indication that they did,” Kennedy would write years later. Allen’s instructions were “pure surplussage,” he added.
The correspondents were herded into a room inside the school building, where they cooled their heels for hours while waiting for the appropriate Germans to show up. Once Colonel General Gustav Jodl, the new chief of staff of the German Army, rolled into the schoolhouse, the correspondents were herded into another room, which had been furnished with a horseshoe arrangement of long tables.
The surrender was signed at 2:41 a.m. on May 7. Photographs of the event show Kennedy and the other correspondents in the background, standing against a wall watching the proceedings. Their view of the signing was blocked by Jodl’s bald head.
Once back in Paris, the correspondents scrambled to get their completed stories (written while they were flying back from Reims) up to the official messaging center for clearance. As always, it was understood that stories cleared by censors would be dispatched on a first-come first-served basis. So whoever could get their completed story to the censors first would have the scoop. The UPI correspondent, Boyd Lewis, won the race, arriving at the upstairs’ messaging center first with copy in hand. A clerk rubber-stamped “No. 1” on his copy. Lewis would have his moment in history when his story got out — once the military censors lifted the embargo.
According to lore, Kennedy might have delivered the story to the censors first, ahead of Lewis, had he not tripped over a typewriter while rushing through the revolving door at Hotel Scribe. It was said that Jimmy Kilgallen "accidentally" tossed his typewriter into the door on purpose, to slow down the competition at his heels. Kilgallen was the correspondent for International News Service, another Associated Press rival.
While the rest of the correspondents were filing their stories with their military minders, Kennedy ran upstairs to his AP office upstairs to meditate on the situation. “To have such a story to tell and not be able to tell it — I found that depressing,” he said later.
Checking the dispatches coming into his office, he learned that French officials had notified the press that President Charles DeGaulle was preparing his V-Day speech. Newspapers in London reported that loudspeakers were being erected at 10 Downing Street so Winston Churchill could cheer his fellow countrymen with news of a surrender. A foreign minister for the German government went on the radio to announce to his countrymen that the war was over. “People in the know were reputed to be making large sums of money in the markets,” Kennedy said. The surrender was the worst-kept secret in Europe, yet the reporters at the Scribe were expected to keep quiet about it all. All the while, citizens in the United States had no way of learning what was happening in Europe, and they were relying on correspondents who for the most part acceded to yet another ridiculous military order.
Kennedy learned that the embargo had been imposed by the U.S. with the intent of mollifying the Soviet Union. While a Russian emissary was among the signatories of the surrender at Reims, the Soviet brass wanted to stage their own surrender ceremony so they could claim full credit for the war’s end. Desperate to remain in the Soviet Union’s good graces, the U.S. military agreed to hold off on news of surrender so the USSR could do its own dog-and-pony show. The embargo had been a political expedient.
So Kennedy made up his mind. He trudged down to the SHAEF messaging center to tell the censors that he would be sending his story early. He wanted to be transparent about his intentions and his rationale. But his minders shrugged it off, apparently thinking he was bluffing.
Kennedy knew of an open phone line to offices in London, a line in the hotel that bypassed the censors in the messaging center. So he returned to his office and dictated a shortened version of his story over the phone to the AP headquarters in New York until the connection went bad. The news went over the wire. The New York Times picked it up almost immediately.
THE NEWS SPARKED GREAT CELEBRATION across the Western Hemisphere. But while the rest of the planet lost itself in the pure joy of peace, Edward Kennedy’s competing reporters and his frantic military handlers at SHAEF were enraged, furious that Kennedy violated the embargo.
Among Ed Kennedy’s detractors was Lewis, the UPI reporter who had been first in line at the messaging center. His competition with Kennedy had never been friendly, and now he screamed bloody murder. Lewis bore a grudge against Kennedy until the day he died, writing in his own memoir that Kennedy “was a man who had violated censorship so consistently that he (should) have been tagged wherever he went as a recidivist violator.”
While the world celebrated outside Hotel Scribe, 54 of Kennedy’s competitors gathered in the lobby to register their outrage. They signed a petition calling his story “the most disgraceful, unethical double-cross in the history of journalism.”
Within a day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower indefinitely suspended Kennedy and the AP from all further dispatches from Supreme Headquarters. Even while he celebrated the surrender, Eisenhower saw fit to suspend Kennedy and AP. There was talk that Kennedy could face a court martial. Cooler heads prevailed, and Eisenhower lifted the suspension within a day.
Back at the home offices in New York City, the Associated Press first boasted of the scoop, but then retracted its support for Kennedy after hearing the angry rants from military brass and the rest of the jealous correspondents in Paris. And then AP simply let the issue fester, ignoring the controversy and Kennedy.
Kennedy was recalled to New York, but was not given an assignment. He was drawing a paycheck but he was left in limbo. He spent the next 14 months of his life back in the United States trying to salvage his reputation. At the time, his alleged “betrayal” of journalistic standards continued to rage among journalists. His competitors wrote angry screeds, demanding that Kennedy face the consequences.
Kennedy did enjoy a bit of support among reporters in the United States. A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker, notably, wrote that “the habit of saying yes to people you don’t respect is hard to break, which is one reason I think well of Edward Kennedy for breaking it.”
In August 1948, The Atlantic Magazine published an essay by Kennedy, explaining his side of the story. The story was headlined “I’d Do It Again.”
But for a year and a half, Kennedy sat idle in New York, waiting to hear of his fate with the wire service. He finally broke ties with the Associated Press completely.
About that same time, Eisenhower was more circumspect about Kennedy’s scoop. “In my own heart, after reflection and after the war, I find only room to believe that the error was committed in an excess of zeal,” he said.
After he and the Associated Press finally parted company, Kennedy signed on to work at the Santa Barbara News-Press. He was now far from New York, far from the prestige that came as a foreign correspondent.
The War Years
COL. ALLEN GRIFFIN was among Kennedy’s greatest admirers. A World War I hero who led a combat infantry company in Europe after graduating from Stanford, Griffin founded the Monterey Peninsula Herald in 1921.
And when World War II started, he turned over operations of The Herald to his editors so, at the age of 45, he could return to active duty with the Army. He had already earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Croix de Guerre and the Purple Heart after the Meuse-Argonne campaign during his years in WWI, and he again answered the call of duty after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He commanded the 13th Infantry Regiment in battles from Normandy through Brittany, Belgium and Germany, in service that earned him even more ribbons, medals and brass.
With his own unique experience as both a newspaper owner and a war hero, Griffin had admired Kennedy from afar. And when he learned that Kennedy was working in Santa Barbara after the war, he lured him to Monterey by making him associate editor and publisher.
Before Kennedy showed up, The Herald was a provincial little paper without much life. Griffin and Kennedy shared a sophisticated understanding of the world beyond Monterey — and they respected the intelligence of their readers — so The Herald devoted much of its front and inside pages to foreign affairs, without sacrificing coverage of topical local issues. Its reporters spent more time covering local city councils, following the growth and progress of the Peninsula as though covering a world war.
Even after his military service after WWII, Griffin served the country as an envoy on behalf of the United States. Among other duties, he spent a year in China trying to patch relationships with Chiang Kai Shek. Later, while on a diplomatic mission to Indochina, he survived the bombing of a Saigon Hotel.
With Griffin trotting the globe, Kennedy had real authority at The Herald. From the newspaper’s offices, which were then located at Washington and Pearl streets in Monterey, he employed and managed a newsroom of hard-boiled reporters.
Like Griffin, Kennedy was also a bit of an activist; he worked for liberal causes, helped found the local American Civil Liberties Union, and “covered” the Democratic Party National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960 because he admired John F. Kennedy.
In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a president, vacationed on the Monterey Peninsula, where he played golf at Pebble Beach. Kennedy was asked to accompany the president to church at Carmel Presbyterian. More than a decade after Eisenhower angrily dis-accredited Kennedy, they were chumming it up on Kennedy’s home turf.
BY 1963, Kennedy’s two-pack-a-day habit was catching up with his health. Often he was too ill to get out of bed.
But late in November of that year, he and the rest of the newsroom worked long hours to keep readers informed about the assassination of JFK. The news was shocking, and Edward Kennedy was reportedly badly shaken by this horrifying international tragedy.
“The pointlessness of such killings makes them all the more horrible and renders our shock and grief all the more profound,” Ed Kennedy wrote, in his signed essay published in The Herald on Nov. 22, 1963. “It is an evidence of the truth of the ancient story of the sword of Damocles, always suspended over the King’s head by a slender thread, and of the saying from Shakespeare: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.‘“
After putting the paper to bed around midnight on Nov. 24, 1963, Kennedy walked home in the dark. As he crossed the street at the intersection of Pacific and Eldorado he was struck by a sports car driven by a young woman. He was taken to the hospital, and the prognosis seemed positive. But he died as a result of his injuries five days later.
More than 20 years later, the old journalists I worked with still talked about the night Ed Kennedy was struck by that car, about his legacy and about their grief.
About a dozen years ago, a committee of West Coast journalists campaigned the Pulitzer Prize committee to award Kennedy the prize posthumously. The effort fizzled, presumably because the committee doesn’t issue retroactive awards.
Meanwhile, his daughter, writer Julia Kennedy Cochran, had worked long and hard to get her father’s first-person account of history into the public record. Kennedy’s memoir was eventually published by Louisiana State University Press in 2012. The autobiography was titled Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press. At the time of its publication, the Associated Press issued a formal apology for abandoning the old war correspondent.
Cochran wrote a touching epilogue in the book; it describes the good, sweet times she had spent with her father (he and Cochran’s mother divorced soon after they moved to Monterey).
She also tried to answer how her father’s scoop — and the reaction to it — had impacted the rest of his career, the rest of his life. “Was my father bitter about the outcome of his fateful decision to defy the Army censors in 1945?” she asked. He may have been, but he never really talked to her about it, Cochran wrote.
“But I knew there was something in his past that bothered him,” she added. “Sometimes he sat at the kitchen table late at night and drank heavily, muttering softly to himself words that I could not catch.”
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Sources:
Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, & The Associated Press. Ed Kennedy. Louisiana State University Press, 2012.
The Atlantic, “I’d Do It Again,” by Edward Kennedy, August 1948.
The Monterey Peninsula Herald
United Press International, July 22, 1981
A Treasury of Great Reporting. Edited by Louis Snyder and Richard Morris. Simon & Schuster, 1949.
Not Always a Spectator: A Newsman’s Story. Boyd DeWolf Lewis. The Wolf’s Head Press, 1981.
Thor M. Smith Papers. (Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas)
Autopsy No. CA-3261: Final Analysis. Dr. W.S. Ernoehazy, Monterey County pathologist, Nov. 11, 1963.
The New York Times, Nov. 30, 1963.
The Wayward Press, by A.J. Liebling. The New Yorker, May 19, 1945.
Operation ‘Jackplane,’ Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Public Relations Division. April 30, 1945. (Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas)
“The Press: Case Closed.” Time Magazine. Aug. 5, 1946
“Surrender at Reims,” by Charles Christian Wertenbaker. Life Magazine. May 21, 1945.
Statement by Brigadier General Frank A. Allen, Jr. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. May 9, 1945. (Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas)
“The Strange Case of Ed Kennedy.” Newsweek Magazine. Aug. 5, 1946
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Joe:
One of your best yet! I can tell this was a labor of love for you. Very interesting and entertaining read. Keep it up! Mike