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.

Pacifism and Stupidity

James Altucher wrote the following thoughtful Memorial Day reflection.

As you'll notice as you read it, he railed against the stupidity of every war he mentions, and found none of them "worth it." I won't argue with him there.

He also says, incidentally, that he dislikes the fact that making this anti-stupidity point might make him seem like a "pro-peace" person. Being pro-peace, he said, is "not what this is about."

I wasn't the only reader of his reflections who wondered why he would insist on a distinction between railing against war and being pro-peace. Doesn't opposing anything usually entail holding out some hope for an alternative? I thought I had come up with an adequate explanation for what he meant, but then started reading the comments section to find my explanation up-ended.

You'll also see, if you go rather deep into the comments thread, that "dinosaurtrader" asks him about this matter too. "Why hate feeling like a 'pro-peace' person? What's so bad about that?"

He replied that this was a good point, and that perhaps a "shame factor" entered into his use of that expression.

That's where I jumped in, and I'll just reproduce here my own comment.

As to the difference between being pro-peace and being anti-stupidity-of-war, I thought you were making a valuable distinction. After all, in 1938 Gandhi wrote a rather fatuous essay on the ongoing persecution of Jews in Germany (which was of course still, as we can say in hindsight, in early stages), and I submit that his essay to which I will link you in a moment shows the limitations of what it means to be a peace person. He said: "But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing death has no terror."
click.

If THAT is pro-peace, then pro-peace is pretty stupid., I think in retrospect at least there might be a lot more Jews in the world today than there are had there been more resistence: two, three, four, a dozen Warsaw uprisings.

On the other hand, the wars that you reference don't have a lot to do with the Warsaw ghetto uprising. So, yes, I saw your point (if this was your point) in dissassociating yourself from sentiments like that on one hand, while opposing the stupidity of war on the other.

I hope you don't abandon that distinction entirely.

From the brief history of South Vietnam

Today was an important day in the brief history (1955 - 1975) of the Republic of Vietnam (aka of "South Vietnam.")

It was on February 27, 1962, that two pilots in the air force of that republic bombed and strafed the presidential palace in Saigon in an effort to assassinate the president, Ngo Dinh Diem. As an assassination, it failed. Three staffers in the palace died; another 30 were injured, but the President and his family members survived. Nor did the bombing serve as a catalyst for the general uprising that the pilots seem to have expected.

Indeed, its immediate effect may have been to persuade Diem that he was under God's protection. That's never a good sign, and of course God can withdraw in November the protection He seems to extend in February.

One of the pilots had to ditch his plane soon after the attack, was arrested, and spent a few months in prison. He was released soon after the more successful anti-Diem coup that November. The other pilot escaped to Cambodia, where the Sihanouk government had a policy of offering sanctuary from anti-Diem plotters.

The point? Nothing much, just some melancholy food for thought on a drizzly late-February day.

One day between the world wars

It was on February 26, 1935, seventy-four years ago today, that Robert Alexander Watson-Watt first demonstrated a prototype of what would become known as radar.

Watson-Watt demonstrated his ability to track the movements of an RAF bomber, in front of the member of a committee of the Air Ministry. He received a patent on the gizmo in April 2 of that year.

The prototype didn't have much of a range, but the possibility of such bat-like tracking had been established.

By fascinating coincidence, it was on the very same day, February 26, 1935, that Hitler signed a secret order establishing the Reich Luftwaffe, and putting Goering at its head. The order had to be secret because Germany was at this point still claiming to be in compliance with the Versailles treaty, which was blatantly violated by the creation of an air force.

The British headstart on the development of radar would prove of great consequence in the defense of the UK -- and by proxy the defense of civilization -- against the assault of the Luftwaffe in the period 1940-41, so it is a nice novelistic touch that the run-up to that showdown includes these two simultaneous events.

"The mountains are high"

There's an old Cantonese saying: The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away.

It means what the late American politician Tip O'Neill also meant when he said, with less imagery but greater concision, "All politics is local."

I encountered this proverb in a novel recommended to me by a friend, Fragrant Harbour (2002) by John Lanchester. It comes into play there because one of the characters, Matthew Ho, runs an air conditioner manufacturing business, headquartered in Hong Kong but with certain crucial investments in Canton, the province of mainland China surrounding that special administrative region.

Matthew's investments run into trouble, of a sort that's make-or-break for his business as a whole. He tries to threaten a provincial official with the prospect of goig over his head to Beijing, only to be told: "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away." We do our own thing around here, buddy.

Read about Lanchester's novel here or just admire the front cover above.

To test whether the proverb was perhaps the product of Mr. Lanchester's imagination, I did manage to drop it into a conversation I had with a businessman while I was in Hong Kong recently. He recognized it, and seemed pleased that I knew of it.

The idea that the southeast of China does things differently, that the mountains are high, etc., long predates the arrival of the Brits in the region. It may date to a Mongol invasion of China in the 13th century. As the Mongols conquered the north, the remnants of the Song dynasty retreated into what Canton. Though the Mongols eventually ended resistance there, too in one of the largest naval battles of history, and the Cantonese had to recognize Kublai Khan as their emperor, they may have begun soon thereafter to take solace in the idea expressed in the proverb.

He's up there in his "stately pleasure dome," and we're here shaking down air conditioner makers.