That AP Apology

For what is AP apologizing?

For firing a guy who broke his word, 67 years and one week ago.

This is an odd (and old) story, but it is also an intriguing footnote to a great historic event, V-E Day.

When Hitler was dead, and the remnants of his inner circle were at last ready to surrender, the Allies decided on two distinct surrender ceremonies -- one involving the western allies, the other involving Russia.

The AP won what some call the biggest scoop in its history -- it was the first organization to report the end of the war in Europe. Even the NY Times ran the AP story that day -- and the mighty Times almost never deigns to use wire services reports, or admit to it. Anyway, you can see the copy here:

MAY 4 1945

But ... it then fired the reporter who had done so.

That was Edward Kennedy. He agreed, as did the other reporters 'embedded' (they didn't use that tern then) with the US Armed Forces and in a position to know about this, that they wouldn't report the story until they got the okay.

Why not? Diplomacy. The Russian surrender ceremony took longer to arrange than the western one, and the Russians wanted Germany's surrender to them to be announced to the world at the same time as Germany's surrender to the US and UK.

But Kennedy decided (in his own words, in a memoir): "Once the war is over, you can't hold back information like that. The world needed to know."

Kennedy has passed away. The AP has apologized to his daughter. CEO Tom Curley says, "It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way."

Well ... maybe. The AP ran with the scoop and then fired him. Maybe a better idea would have been NOT to run with the scoop, and to fire him quietly for trying to pass it off as a news story? Or (if they agreed with him that the world's need to know exceeded the imperative of keeping one's word) run the scoop and keep him on payroll. Either it was wrong or it wasn't. Getting the benefit and dumping the liability -- is that what they're apologizing for?

The story is getting international play. Here's the Jakarta Post. (In their part of the world, of course, the war wasn't over in May. That was part of the reason the western powers had to make nice with Stalin as per surrender ceremonies and such.) Of course the Jakarta Post isn't publishing its own account of the AP apology. It is one of many papers around the world running ... the AP account of same.



Or taking unfair advantage of their competition, whose reporters did keep their word?

Here is another take.  Written by the son of another 1940s-era journalist, one of those who didn't break that particular story but who could have, and who in fact knew about this before Kennedy did.

Quote from Vanderbilt

"It is said that I am always in opposition, and that the same spirit of resistance which has often hitherto governed my action has influenced it now ....I have only to say, that this is the same spirit which founded this great Republic, and which is now drawing the commerce of the world to our shores. It was the same spirit which unchained the fetters which legislation ... once fastened upon the Hudson. Repress it if you dare....The share of prosperity which has fallen to my lot is the direct result of unfettered trade and unrestrained competition."

NEW YORK TRIBUNE, March 8, 1855.

Vanderbilt, as a young man, had played a supporting role in the facts that led to the great Supreme Court decision as to steamboats on the Hudson, and the burdening of interstate commerce, GIBBONS v. OGDEN (1824), and that is one of his allusions above.

Sci Fi and Related Genres

Any of my readers who have any interest in science fiction, horror, fantasy, or related fictional genre will soon find himself in love with this graphic.

And for those with an interest in mathematics, it ends up looking a bit like a Mandelbrot set!

The key plot of the meta-story is revealed in the legends along the top:
adventure dominant; science dominant; sociology dominant; form dominant; Star Wars dominant.

As even that much information conveys, we have a wild intermingling here of high and low brow.

But I'll say no more.

Oxymandias Meme, Conclusion

As I said yesterday, Graves returns to this theme -- the boast of immortality for one's achievements juxtaposed with posterities actual ignorance thereof.

Certainly his best use of it is in a poem straightforwardly titled, "To Evoke Posterity." You can find it for yourself here.

The first stanza states the theme:

"To evoke posterity
Is to weep on your own grave,
Ventriloquizing for the unborn...."

Subsequent stanzas get increasingly derisive toward those who think they will receive some posthumous reverence. How great will it be, exactly, "To be cast in bronze for a city square,/ To dribble green in times of rain/ And stain the pedestal"?

If you are written up in the history books, what then, the narrative voice asks. You will just be "two more dates of life and birth" for the study of boys and girls. But they won't study you anyway, because all the ones "of mettle" will play truant, "and worn excuses try."

Altogether a very lively poem.

Marconi's demonstration

Today is the anniversary of a foundational event in the development of mass media of communication.

On October 16, 1899, 109 years ago, Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated his new wireless telegraph, what we call radio.

All radio could transmit at that time were the dots and dashes of telegraphy. Still, it was a marvel. And that first use, in the demonstration of October 1899, broadcast yacht racing results. He broadcast from Sandy Hook, Long Island, and the bulletins were received in Herald Square, New York City.

So give some thought to Mr. Marconi this day. And give some thought, too, while your thoughts are telegraphic, to Jack Phillips, the wireless operator who went down with the Titanic thirteen years later.

As the ship foundered, and as the captain knew the end was near, he released Phillips from his duty. A lesser man might have headed for the deck and the hope of a space on the rapidly-filling lifeboats. Phillips stayed in his seat, above and beyond the call of duty, and kept sending out the distress call until the ship's engines failed and there was no power with which to transmit.

All the lifeboats were gone by then.

Phillips' sacrifice has become myth-incrusted. Phillips was NOT, in fact, the first wireless operator to use the SOS call. The call had been proposed by a conference in Berlin in 1906, and adopted by Great Britain in 1908. The myth-busting website Snopes covers the general subject with its usual thoroughness. It documents seven examples of ships that sent out SOS calls between 1908 and April of 1912.

But the fact remains: Phillips did start the evening by sending out the older CQD call, later switching to the new-fangled SOS.

So when you toast Marconi and the invention of the wireless, make sure that whatever you're drinking is neat. No ice. Phillips would prefer it that way.

Derbyshire & Clifford

I've recently been reading a book by John Derbyshire on the history of algebra, called "Unknown Quantity." It's a follow-up of sorts to his book on the still unproven (and unfalsified) Riemann Conjecture concerning prime numbers, which I believe I mentioned earlier in this blog.

Anyway, in the more recent Derbyshire book, I came across a brief passage about the 19th century English mathematician William Kingdon Clifford.

Clifford is an important name for those of us who admire William James. Not for his mathematical accomplishments (which are undoubted) but for his venture into philosophy (which was unfortunate). It was Clifford who wrote that it is our general duty to our species to guard our minds from unproven beliefs, even if they should happen to be true. Believing something on insufficient evidence is like accepting into one's body "a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town."

James thought this simply ridiculous, with "too much of robustious pathos in the voice" as he said, and it inspired him to write the famous/notorious essay "The Will to Believe."

But Derbyshire's passage doesn't mention any of that. He's interested in Clifford as a mathematician, one responsible for generalizing "Hamilton's quaternions into a whole family of n-dimensional algebras."

I won't explain here what that means, what Hamilton's quarternions are. It is fully discussed in the context of the book. I was simply impressed by this example of what seems to have been a general 19th century truth. One could still get a reputatiuon as a considerable philosopher without any academic credentials in the field, but one did have to have academic credentials in some field.

Clifford earned his bones in math, as James did in psychology.

Death of David Halberstam

Halberstam died this Monday in a car accident.

The manner of his death was perhaps the least interesting fact about his life. Halberstam will be best remembered for his coverage of America's war in Vietnam.

His reports stood out as early as 1963, when he wrote an eye-witness account of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. The following year,he shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting with Malcolm W. Browne, for their coverage of the overthrow of the Diem regime.

He entered another realm entirely when he reporting on the Washington policy-making behind the war, in his classic book The Best and the Brightest (1972). It is sad, and disabling, for reporters to become the objects of coverage themselves -- the center of the spotlight they should be directing elsewhere -- and this was the grave difficulty Halberstam faced after the appearance of B and the B.

Indeed, the self-referential character of his next bog book, The Powers that Be (1979), a study of the media elite, confirmed the problem. This book became the object of some genuine admiration for the undiminished investigative energies that poured into it but, more visible, it became the target of satire.

Still, he was Halberstam. There was only one, and that one kept working. Four new books in the 1980s and six in the 1990s. Four books in the new century, including Firehouse (2002), his take on 9/11.

But let us leave him by remembering the moments when on his own account he felt most alive, in the rice paddies, covering THE great story of his day. He wrote once to his daughter and described his feelings in the Kennedy years, after he was re-assigned from the Congo to Indochina.

"Someday I hope you will understand how important those moments were for me; more, I want you to understand the importance of remembering, of holding onto and even cherishing a part of what you have been as, more and more, events are thrust upon you. For all too often in this world, and I think with increasing force, the present seeks to obliterate the past-something I hope you will not lightly accept."