Blazing Pencils

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FIRST CASUALTY. From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker by PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY

465 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.

It is hard to believe that before Phillip Knightley took time out from his journalistic duties for London's Sunday Times to write his history of war correspondents, the subject had lain underfoot like an undiscovered gold mine. The events are momentous. As for the correspondents, they are an irresistible assortment of idealists, artists, cads, hustlers, violence junkies and necrophiles.

Knightley's lightly armed narrative charges from the Crimean War, where the modern techniques of reporting and censorship began, to Viet Nam, where television brought packaged blood and flame into the home and censorship was abandoned in favor of a massive public relations campaign to sell the war. Famous locations and faces flash by in Knightley's 120-year extravaganza, but some things never change. In the correspondents' rush to be first with the news, the truth is usually distorted and sometimes sacrificed. Sooner or later, a government official gets around to asking a zealous reporter, "Whose side are you on?" The journalist must then try to formulate a convincing answer out of his sense of professional responsibility, fear of losing his job, private prejudices, and not always flattering motives for chasing war news in the first place.

Richard Harding Davis' pressure-cooked dispatches from Cuba, for example, were clearly calculated to inflame U.S. opinion and trigger the Spanish-American War that Davis' boss, William Randolph Hearst, wanted. During the Boer War, the 25-year-old correspondent of London's Morning Post, Winston Churchill, carried a Mauser pistol and played soldier. Twelve years later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was part of Britain's censorship and propaganda machine.

Passions ran so high in the Spanish Civil War that many American correspondents joined the International Brigade. The New York Times's Herbert Matthews defended his open partisanship on the ground that it would have been hypocritical to claim objectivity when he was certain that he was right. George Orwell was just as committed to Republican Spain. But he was able to see that the Stalinist left was as anxious to eliminate Spain's independent left as it was to defeat Franco.

Some journalists at the time were not so open about their affiliations. Reporter Kim Philby was a Communist agent (he defected to the Soviet Union in 1963). Arthur Koestler also took instruction from Moscow and falsified atrocities. North American Newspaper Alliance's Ernest Hemingway, by all accounts a mediocre correspondent, proved to be a dangerous nuisance as well. On at least one visit to the front he insisted on firing a machine gun toward the Franco lines. The result, reported one witness, was "a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay."

Hemingway used the war to soak up material for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Earlier in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh witnessed Mussolini's campaign against Haile Selassie's antiquated army. Waugh too was no shakes as a journalist--filing his copy in Latin did not ingratiate him with his editors--but he returned from Africa to disguise his experiences in Scoop, still the best satire on journalism ever written.

Boom-Boom. War photographers appear to be a breed apart--which is probably a good thing. "I used to be a war-a-year man," says the London Sunday Times's Donald McCullin, "but now that's not enough. I need two a year." Associated Press Photographer Horst Faas, who plastered his office in Saigon with atrocity pictures the way some men hang pinups, admitted to a colleague, "Vot I like eez boom-boom. Oh, yes." To New York Herald Tribune Reporter Marguerite Higgins, covering earlier conflicts, combat was more overtly sexual. She would not marry, she told friends, "until I find a man who's as exciting as war."

The camera seems to do strange things to the picture taker, viewer and subject alike. The A.P.'s Peter Arnett recalls watching a Buddhist monk in Viet Nam douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. "I could have prevented that immolation," says Arnett. "As a human being, I wanted to; as a reporter, I couldn't." Undoubtedly the issue was further complicated because the monk wanted pictures of his suicide circulated round the world.

It has become commonplace to say that the Viet Nam War was the most thoroughly covered in history. The cost in correspondents remains shocking: 45 killed, 18 missing. Author Knightley has high praise for those professionals who not only had to unravel the official lies and distortions but also had to fight Stateside editors who trusted Washington's optimistic version of events.

But Knightley is hard to please. After conceding that correspondents like Charles Mohr, Malcolm Browne and David Halberstam were "courageous and skilled," he criticizes them for only questioning the effectiveness of the war and not American intervention itself.

Moreover, the smooth Fleet Street professional is not without his own inadequacies. His preferences are understandable. The flamboyant correspondents make livelier copy than Knightley's accounts of Edward R. Murrow, A.J. Liebling, Alan Moorehead and Ernie Pyle--men who muffled the "boom-boom" in favor of the human voice. But as every journalist learns, readability has its casualties too.

After some hairsplitting qualifications, he anoints as the first modern war correspondent William Howard Russell, who wrote the account of the charge of the Light Brigade--and later performed brilliantly during the U.S. Civil War. Had he been educated by the Russian side, Knightley might have recalled that a young second lieutenant brought the horrors of the Crimean War home to Moscow with his articles from Sevastopol. They miraculously passed through the censors untouched, and bore the byline Leo Tolstoy. R.Z. Sheppard

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