When Journalists Die in War

By Roger Rosenblatt

Certain responses are to be expected whenever a journalist is killed in a war. His employers will remark on his courage and devotion to duty, his colleagues on his professionalism; from close friends and family will come expressions of grief or anger. Occasionally, in the case of celebrities, a President will offer a eulogy, as did Harry Truman for Ernie Pyle, killed in the South Pacific in 1945: "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as the American fighting man wanted it told." The standard was dubious, but the praise sincere. For the public these moments pass rather quickly, like any death in a war. Yet these killings are central to the function of journalism. In odd ways, if briefly, they clarify the relationship among the news, those who report it and the people who seek those reports.

The nature of this relationship was illustrated in the deaths last week of two American journalists, Dial Torgerson and Richard Cross, who were killed when their white, rented Toyota was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade on a road in Honduras near the Nicaraguan border (see PRESS). Nicaraguan soldiers apparently added machine-gun fire to the damage of the grenade. This kind of story always startles people, though it is hard to say why.

In part the surprise simply comes from the announcement of a personalized death; two named and photographed victims in a war automatically draw more attention than statistical casualties. Then, too, there is something about the rhythm and character of their work: the white moving line of the automobile perpendicular to the guns, the pursuit of one profession bisecting another. There is the matter of their being journalists, who as cultural figures are always accorded a special (half revered, half resented) slot in the public mind, and of their being foreign correspondents in particular, with all the folklore glamour associated with that work. There is the influence of television, which has aggrandized the whole profession. It may also be that these deaths attract notice because they serve to remind people that risk entails the possibility of failure. It is acutely shocking to learn that risk takers can lose.

Of course, one must also allow for the possibility that the deaths of journalists are important only to other journalists, the attention given by the press being wholly disproportionate to true public interest. Yet this seems not the case. For a hundred years, war reporters have provided a basic service, apart from increasing the profits of their employers. "If it is a solitary profession, it is also a kind of loving involvement with history," Georgie Anne Geyer confessed in Buying the Night Flight: the Autobiography of a Woman Correspondent. The involvement is the reader's equally, journalism being history on the run. When the correspondent is removed, so is the citizen, who is then left to assess the conduct of a war by official and authorized reports. Not that one is ever sure that what the paper prints is what really happened, but the presumption, however grumpily arrived at, favors the more disinterested observer.

For all the grandeur of the correspondent's responsibilities, however, he is usually the most unromantic of creatures. The exceptions spring to mind because they are exceptions: John Reed dying for Mother Russia, Richard Harding Davis, swaggering with his brace of pistols. Most war reporters are quieter, almost sullen--frown-ridden loners stretched out in weird hotel lounges, waiting wearily upon the return of yet more troops from yet another major offensive or the disclosure of an atrocity from yet another smooth-voiced press officer. Even those who run with rebels in the tropics must find the perils repetitious after a while, the colorful characters melting into abstractions. In these times, a correspondent may move so quickly from Afghanistan to Beirut to Ethiopia, it is a wonder that he is able to distinguish the names of towns from Prime Ministers. Less a wonder is that these people sometimes grow hard around the heart; when you've seen one mutilation, you've seen them all. Still, as Arthur Koestler wrote of the war in Spain: "Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his heart, his stomach, and then pretends to be objective, is a liar."

Is objectivity at last what the public seeks from its reporters? Certainly, in matters as urgent as wars, no one wants impressionistic sketches or first-person pleas for conciliation, but it may be that pure objectivity is sought less than simple completeness, a good eye and ear for detail. People often have a hard time dealing with facts that distort their presumptions, but that is what they ask of their messengers: tell everything. The difficulty in war reporting is that no one, on any side, wants everything told. Everything includes cowardice, dishonor, the breaking of codes. He who tells everything represents a greater menace than the opponent's weaponry, which is why every sensible commander tries to keep correspondents away from the action. The best of the lot are welcome nowhere.

Nor in fact is the public welcome in a war, except when one assumes that it may be aroused in support of one's own side. Open as they are, wars are essentially private acts, guilty violations of civilized standards. "Now and then," wrote Ernest Bennett about "potting Dervishes" in the Westminster Gazette in 1898, "I caught in a man's eye the curious gleam which comes from the joy of shedding blood--that mysterious impulse which, despite all the veneer of civilization, still holds its own in a man's nature." If most generals had their way, wars would probably be fought on other planets, free from inspection that leads to judgment, which itself may join the hostile forces.

William Howard Russell, one of the first war correspondents, wrote of the British hauteur in the Crimea: "Am I to tell these things or hold my tongue?" He asked the question of the trade. Today one normally expects that journalists will not hold their tongues, perhaps because Russell and others did not, or perhaps because it is common now to regard war as inglorious, even purposeless. In a sense, journalists always have been the enemies of war. From a tactical viewpoint, one almost might say it lies in the interests of the participants to kill them off, since inevitably they hold the enterprise up to the light.

When Torgerson and Cross died last week, so did the public, for a moment, which may be the main reason one feels their deaths, and the death of all war correspondents, with a sort of intellectual pain. These curious people who take notes in the world's most murderous places may do so mostly for themselves, for the thrill or the value of being at the centers of experience. But they take to the wars for everyone else as well, for those who may wish to be lulled by lies from time to time but who in the long run do not wish to live as dupes or fools. For them do the far-flung correspondents patrol the lines, seeking to report how fares the dark.

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.