Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)

·58 min·5 clips

Ed Kennedy discovered a secret phone circuit to London to bypass military censors and report Germany's surrender.

Host Dr. Andrew Pace interviews Richard Fine, professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, about his 2023 book 'The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany'. Fine explains his background in American studies and how a Fulbright in France led him to journalist A.J. Liebling's work, sparking interest in WWII press-military relations. His research at the National Archives and AP Corporate Archives uncovered the Ed Kennedy affair. The episode details the historical context: in early May 1945, German forces were surrendering piecemeal, with the Allies insisting on unconditional surrender to all powers, including the Soviets. Eisenhower's SHAEF command in Reims planned a surrender ceremony on May 7, inviting 17 reporters (the 'Lucky 17'), including AP bureau chief Ed Kennedy, but imposed a 36-hour news blackout to coordinate announcements with Churchill, Stalin, and Truman. Kennedy, an experienced war reporter, grew frustrated as news leaked via French newspapers and German radio broadcasts from Flensburg. Believing SHAEF had broken the embargo, he used an uncensored phone circuit to transmit the story to AP London, which then sent it to New York, making it the first major report of the surrender. The fallout was immediate: SHAEF suspended AP operations in Europe, and though AP initially celebrated the scoop, pressure from Eisenhower led AP president Robert McLean to repudiate Kennedy. Kennedy was quietly fired later in 1945. Fine explores Kennedy's motives, suggesting a mix of principled opposition to political censorship and competitive drive. The discussion contrasts this with the Soviet-orchestrated surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8. Fine concludes that WWII media-military relations were far tenser than the nostalgic 'good war' narrative suggests, with censorship often used for political, not security, reasons, prefiguring later conflicts like Vietnam. The episode examines broader themes of journalistic ethics, public right to know, and government information control.

As heard by us

A wartime reporting story about censorship, speed, and reporters racing to print.

The episode turns the book into a tight account of a reporter who ignored an order to hold back the surrender story and rushed it to print. Its strongest stretch follows the lucky 17 reporters flown back to Paris after the break, and that detail gives the material real momentum.

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Why you'd press play

You get a wartime newsroom story about one reporter who raced to the surrender and disobeyed orders to hold the news.

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