Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else

Princeton Architectural Press

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Contents 6

F o rew o rd David Halberstam

18

P reface Thomas Curley

20

Gl o ssary o f W ire S ervice T erms

22

War I:

54

86

106

130

160

216

War II:

A Circuit to Anywhere

Soldiers of the Press

Richard Pyle

Richard Pyle

Trials:

254

Foreign Correspondents:

Crime and Punishment

A Rare Breed

Frances R. Mears

Larry Heinzerling

Freedom of Information:

306

Photographs:

A Fight Is What This Is

Why Not a Camera?

Nancy Benac

Hal Buell

Aviation:

340

Disasters:

Like a Monster Bird

A Walk Through Hell

Howard Benedict

Jerry Schwartz

Sports:

366

The White House:

Thrills to Last a Lifetime

The Ultimate Road Trip

Darrell Christian

Terry Hunt and Cal Woodward

Elections:

402

A B rief hist o ry o f ap Walter R. Mears

When Is AP Going to Call This Thing?

414

ap g eneral a g ents , g eneral

Tom Jory

414

mana g ers , and ce o s o ffices o f the ass o ciated press in new y o rk city

190

Civil Rights:

415

ackn o wled g ments

A Different Kind of Conflict

416

c o ntribut o rs

Mike Feinsilber

418

E N D N o tes

428

I nde x

Civil Rights

Troopers with fixed bayonets drawing giggles from Central High School students in Little Rock, Arkansas, September 25, 1957. Federal forces were employed to enforce integration in the face of racial tension in Arkansas.

AP photo

A Different Kind of Conflict

Mike Feinsilber

On the night of April 4, 1968, Doug Stone was the only newsperson

working at AP’s bureau in Memphis, Tennessee. He had been with Associated Press for only ten months. Memphis was tense; Martin Luther King Jr. had gone there to rally striking sanitation workers. Stone kept an ear to the police radio in the bureau while he attended to office routine. Then, from the radio, he heard, “This is tac ten. We have a report that King has been shot at the Lorraine [Motel].”

Mindful of the James Meredith blunder two years earlier, when AP reported that the civil rights marcher had been killed rather than wounded, Stone knew he had to verify the explosive news about King. Fake police messages were not uncommon. He phoned Police Chief Henry Lux. A secretary said Lux had just left. “We understand from the monitors that King may have been shot,” Stone told her. “Oh my God,” she said. “Is that why everybody’s running in the hall?”1 Stone couldn’t get through to the police dispatcher. So he raced downstairs, drove the four blocks to the Lorraine, and got there in time to see King on a stretcher being put into an ambulance. The civil rights leader was motionless, and Stone could not tell if he was alive or dead. He found a phone in a liquor store and dictated what he knew to the bureau in Nashville.

There, reporter Nancy Shipley took the call. Stone heard her cry out, “Break the A!”—an order to the Teletype operator to interrupt, in midstory, even midsentence, whatever was moving on the national wire (the “A”) to send news of transcendent urgency.

After Stone dictated, he set out for the hospital to find out whether King was alive. But all traffic lights in the downtown area had been turned red, a police emergency procedure. Blocked by traffic, he headed for Fire Department headquarters to see if Chief Eddie Hamilton had a report from the ambulance crew. The chief did not, but he let Stone use a direct line to the police chief.

“How are you getting in to me on this line?” Lux demanded.

“I’m at Eddie Hamilton’s office,” Stone explained.

Lux replied, “Doug, King is dead.”

Stone couldn’t get a long distance phone call out. He tried to call AP in New York, in Nashville, in Los Angeles. Finally, he reached his own bureau

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AP reporter Bob Gilbert with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., June 1966, just a few days after James Meredith was shot during King’s voter registration march AP photo by Jack Thornell, APCA

Feinsilber

and asked Teletype operator Harrell Allen to send a news message to Nashville. Allen told him union rules would not allow him to take dictation.

Stone snapped that he thought the rule could be broken this time. It was, and the bulletin provided the first word of the assassination.

The murder of King was a key moment in the civil rights story that had dominated the news and preoccupied the country for two decades. The story took many forms in the 1950s and 1960s: protest marches, riots, noseto-nose showdowns between black demonstrators who offered no resistance and city police or sheriff ’s officers who offered fire hoses, tear gas, whips, clubs, and dogs in response. It involved court fights against segregation in schools and on trains and buses; and resistance to segregation at drinking fountains and in rest rooms, in voting booths, even on public sidewalks. It touched off sit-ins at lunch counters, boycotts, and “freedom rides” on buses going from North to South. Ultimately, five years before King’s death, the civil rights movement led to a great display of a people asserting their rights: the march on Washington in August 1963 that drew two hundred and fifty thousand participants, thrust King into his role as a national leader, and helped secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbidding discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment.

Asserting civil rights became a cause, a social revolution, an uprising unlike anything the country had experienced, and, for news people, a demanding, exciting, and sometimes frightening story.

The counteroffensive was brutal: the torture and murder of fourteenyear-old Emmett Till in Leflore County, Mississippi after he supposedly flirted with a young white woman; the killing of Medgar Evers, the first field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), cut down in his driveway in 1963 by a sniper in Jackson, Mississippi; the murder in 1964 of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, voting rights volunteers in Neshoba County, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan; the Klan slaying in 1965 of Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, as she transported voting rights marchers back from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama. Through it all, and in deliberate stark contrast, King sought to apply the principles of nonviolence of Mohandas Gandhi, the philosopher who had led the successful struggle for India’s independence from Britain.

AP carried the story skirmish by skirmish, the importance of each in the overall scheme of things often obscure. Some of the reporters were stars; more often, AP’s frontline correspondent was an unseasoned beginner, learning under the stress of the story what to do next, how to stay out of danger, where to find a phone.

Relman Morin was one of the stars. The courtly, balding Morin—“Pat” to anyone who knew him—was sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, to cover the

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first major confrontation of the modern civil rights era. He was an AP veteran who had covered wars, been imprisoned by the Japanese, and shared a Pulitzer prize for his reporting from Korea. Now he was covering a different kind of conflict, at home. His stories from Little Rock would earn him his second Pulitzer.

On the morning of September 23, 1957, Morin stood in a glass-walled phone booth reporting on “the howling, shrieking mob of men and women” besieging the school after eight black students enrolled to integrate it under a federal court order.2 Three years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that requiring children to attend schools segregated by race was unconstitutional.

In Little Rock, a federal court ordered compliance with that decision, and the board of education, bending, proposed letting a few blacks attend Central High School. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus said no.

A jeering white mob surrounded the school to block the black children’s entrance. Faubus sent 279 members of the Arkansas National Guard to abet the resistance to integration. The segregationists managed to keep the black pupils out, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted to reassert federal authority. His administration got an injunction against Faubus, and the president sent troops from the 101st Airborne Division to force the admission of the black children. The governor withdrew. The mob did not.

On integration morning, Morin, from his phone booth, delivered the facts: The girls were in bobby sox, and the boys were dressed in shirts open at the neck. All were carrying books.

They were not running, not even walking fast. They simply strolled toward the steps, went up, and were inside before all but a few of the 200 people at that end of the street knew it.

“They’ve gone in,” a man roared. “Oh, God, the niggers are in the school.”

A woman screamed. “Did they get in? Did you see them go in?”

“They’re in now,” some other men yelled.

“Oh, my God,” the woman screamed. She burst into tears and tore at her hair.3

Not surprisingly, the pay telephone booth was a key to Morin’s reporting. Getting the news was the first step; for AP reporters, delivering it from the scene to the wire was the crucial next move, difficult because the civil rights story so often played out in remote places, little known until they became datelines: Newton, Georgia; Covington, Kentucky; Selma, Alabama;

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Feinsilber

Crawfordsville, Georgia; Anniston, Alabama; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Cambridge, Maryland; Ocilla, Georgia. In 1963 alone, 930 civil rights demonstrations were staged in 115 places.4 Atlanta’s Don McKee, who probably covered more civil rights stories than anyone else at AP, recalled “the telephone problem” in reporting on a 225-mile voting rights march across Mississippi in July 1966. “We improvised with a shuttle system: one staffer drove a car and made telephone runs, the others marched,” he said. “But we learned to watch for the telltale wires dipping to houses along the way.”5 In 1970, Hank Downey and Ron Harrist shared a byline on an AP story of deadly violence in Jackson, Mississippi: “Two young Negroes were killed at Jackson State College Friday in a burst of police shotgun and rifle fire that the college president said ‘will not go unavenged,’” the story read.6 There had been early unrest on the campus, and Downey drove by to check the situation. “He got right in the middle of the confrontation,” Harrist said.

Students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, shouting insults at Elizabeth Eckford as she marches down a line of National Guardsmen who block her entrance to the school AP photo by Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Hank called me on a two-way radio he had borrowed from me that afternoon and said things had ignited. I got dressed and rushed down to Jackson State, and we spent the rest of the night reporting. We would take turns calling from a phone booth that was easy to see from both the college dorms and from where the police and Guardsmen were stationed. There was a bright light

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that made the phone booth stand out. There had been a lot of shooting. It was nerve-wracking. One of us would call in while the other stood facing out to watch for danger. We worked that story for the next two days without stopping.7

Atlanta AP’s Kathryn Johnson, left, blending in as “just another student” by donning bobby sox and a sweater to obtain the only eyewitness story of Charlayne Hunter’s first day of classes at the University of Georgia, January 11, 1961. School officials stopped all other reporters at the door.

AP photo

Harrist covered civil rights across Mississippi and the rest of the South. He always wore a necktie and sunglasses when he was on a story. “The Klan would think you were FBI,” he said.8 Alone, no news organization could have handled the civil rights revolution. AP relied on its members—the newspapers that took the service and paid the freight—to help with the coverage. And newspapers, in turn, relied on AP. “Even staff-rich newspapers like the New York Times with a half-dozen reporters working through the South, found that an extremely small force to handle a story breaking throughout the region,” said Bob Haiman, former editor of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and president emeritus of the Poynter Institute for journalists.9 AP’s Kathryn Johnson, stationed in Atlanta, covered a string of civil rights stories, including the “Freedom Rides” of 1961. Although the Supreme Court had declared the segregation of passengers on interstate buses to be unconstitutional the year before, the Southern states had ignored the ruling.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) came up with the idea of riding into the South on buses to desegregate public transportation there. On May 4, 1961, seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C. on two southbound buses.

Johnson recalled meeting one integrated Greyhound at the terminal in Montgomery, Alabama. As the bus pulled in, she recalled: I was phoning the Atlanta AP office from an outside phone booth when several angry white men spotted me dictating.

They ran over, grabbed the phone booth, yanked it off its moorings, and rattled it vigorously, with me inside.

I was rescued by AP photographer Horace Cort, who drove close by, threw open his car door, and yelled, “Katy!

Get in!” The men, startled by Cort, left the booth alone for a moment, giving me a chance to scramble out and into his car, and off we sped.10

Communications were a big problem for reporters on the 44–mile Alabama voting rights march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery. AP reporter Jules Loh was sent from New York to help cover it. “No pay phones

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AP reporters Dan Coggins, left, and Rex Thomas check out a telephone line installed on a pole for their use near a football stadium in Montgomery, Alabama. The phone line gave them instant communications from the scene of a potential story.

AP photo

Feinsilber

along the highway,” he recalled. “We had walkie-talkies which were unreliable at best and generally didn’t work at all.” Montgomery correspondent Rex Thomas solved the problem. He got hold of a lineman’s pole-climbing spikes, alligator clips, and a repairman’s phone. “We were in business, pole after pole.

We scribbled updates in notebooks and Rex climbed the poles and dictated the notes to an AP bureau.”11 AP reporters often found themselves filing stories from Birmingham, Alabama, which long had been the most segregated city in the United States, a Klan stronghold, and the scene of about fifty racial explosions from 1947 to 1963. Blacks came to call it “Bombingham.” Two events in 1963—a brash display of brutality by local police and the Ku Klux Klan’s fatal bombing of a church—made the city the national turning point in the civil rights struggle.

From April 3 to May 8, King led demonstrations, mass meetings, boycotts of downtown stores, sit-ins at lunch counters, and an attempted march on city hall. About thirty-three hundred people were arrested and jailed for defying a state court injunction against holding parades. But arrests were only a small part of the retaliation wrought by Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. A bully with a reputation for racial extremism, Connor ordered police to use fire hoses and German shepherds against peaceful black demonstrators.

A picture shot by AP photographer Bill Hudson on May 3 came to symbolize the police brutality. Hudson made the photo, at a street corner outside the Jockey Boy restaurant, of a police dog handler in dark sunglasses seizing a black boy by his sweater and setting his dog on the youth. The shot shows the officer giving the leash just enough slack to let the dog bury its teeth in the boy’s stomach. The boy, Walter Gadsden, tall, thin, well-dressed, leans into the dog with a look of passive calm, his eyes lowered.

So iconic was the photograph that Diane McWhorter referred to it nine times in Carry Me Home, her 2001 book about Birmingham in 1963.12 “The K-9 Corps of Birmingham,” she wrote, “took its mystical place next to the bloodhounds chasing Eliza across the floes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”13 As she noted, the photograph helped move “international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution” and branded Connor the “villain of the era.”14 Four months after Hudson’s picture appeared, on September 15, a Klan bomb blasted a hole the size of a person in a wall of the 16th Street Baptist Church just as four young black girls, dressed in white from head to toe, primped before a mirror, preparing for a “Youth Day” service. The explosion was so severe it ripped off their clothes.15 Within a few minutes, AP’s Jim Purks was at the church, walking over shards of stained glass. Back in the bureau, he sat down at a manual typewriter and wrote, “ ‘The love that

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Birmingham, Alabama, police turning dogs loose on civil rights demonstrators, May 3, 1963. AP photographer Bill Hudson’s image became an icon of the civil rights movement.

AP photo by Bill Hudson

Firefighters training hoses full force on civil rights demonstrators, July 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the focal points of the desegregation movement AP photo by Bill Hudson

Civil Rights