But they are not exempt.”Įrnest Hemingway did it all, fighting valiantly and writing fearlessly. Of all places in the world, the hospitals of American young men and soldiers, wounded in the volunteer service of their country, ought to be exempt from more conventional military airs and etiquette of shoulder-straps. In general, perhaps, the officials - especially the new ones, with their straps or badges - put on too many airs. I found him sending them to the guard-house for the most trifling offense. One I found who prohibited the men from all enlivening amusements. Some of the ward doctors are careless, rude, capricious, needlessly strict. There are tyrants and shysters in all positions, and especially those dressed in subordinate authority. The Government, as I said, is anxious and liberal in its practice toward its sick, but the work has to be left, in its personal application to the men, to hundreds of officials of one grade or another about the hospitals, who are sometimes entirely lacking in the right qualities. “Many things invite comment, and some of them sharp criticism, in these hospitals. The most distressing passage describes how the injured soldiers were subject to harsh and arbitrary military discipline doled out by incompetent Army bureaucrats. Fighting in history between the invention of the Gatling gun and the discovery of penicillin, Whitman encountered gravely-injured American soldiers at a make-shift hospital in Washington DC, a building that had been the Patent Office, and wrote about his experiences in an essay he called The Great Army of the Wounded. Known mainly for his uplifting brand of Transcendentalist poetry, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) also worked as a journalist and essayist covering perhaps the least pleasant aspect of the American Civil War: the wounded. Though this might’ve been the perfect appointment for him, garnering prestige and funding for the agency as well, Murrow, a life-long smoker, died of cancer in 1965. Kennedy appointed Murrow the head of the United States Information Agency (USIA), a public diplomacy outfit that McCarthy considered a Communist-infiltrated threat. After leaving CBS on less than amiable terms, John F. His documentary Harvest of Shame shed light on the plight of migrant farm laborers in the United States, a social justice message that drew the ire of Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Murrow went on to lay the groundwork for television news. …If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.” “I have reported what I saw and heard,” Murrow declared, “but only part of it. His stark, sobering account of the liberation of Buchenwald earned him criticism from some self-styled censors, all of which he dismissed. When he returned home, Murrow received a welcome from President Roosevelt and became one of America’s first news celebrities.Īfter the Axis attacked, Murrow flew on US bombing raids over Europe, recording his experiences for re-broadcast. Murrow’s sonorous accounts of the Battle of Britain riveted Americans to their radios, listening to the dangerous drama rumbling across the Atlantic. “ This is London,” was the way Murrow began his radio broadcasts for CBS, ending with “good night and good luck,” an expression Londoners used as a farewell during the air raids. Murrow (1908-1965) got his big break in the nightmare of the Blitz, Hitler’s ruthless air assault on London. If they had come to Vietnam and played for US soldiers, Emerson thought, John and Yoko “could have stopped the war.” Sadly, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2004, Emerson committed suicide, terrified that the disease would render her unable to write again.Įdward R. In 1969, Emerson conducted a combative interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, criticizing their approach to protesting the war from afar. Later, she discovered the disturbing prevalence of hard-drug use among American GIs, a shocking example of glassy-eyed Yankee dissociation from the carnage the war had wrought. Determined to reveal the “immense unhappy changes” in the lives of average Vietnamese, Emerson uncovered and condemned a callous culture of “killing at a distance,” whereby stateside Americans failed to comprehend “how huge are the graveyards” that US bombing runs had caused. After stints at Times’ bureaus in London and Paris, she went back to the country when the US intervened in their post-colonial civil war. Gloria Emerson (1929-2004) spent some of her childhood in Saigon, and returned to Vietnam in the 1950s, freelancing for the New York Times.
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