Our national defense and a free press can coexist just fine without political commissars enrolled to unravel the First Amendment. Yet, we now find ourselves in a squalid, unethical situation in which military officers and defense civilians have been ordered to ignore the oath they took to safeguard the Constitution in favor of shielding the dubious activities of political appointees whose ambitions far outstrip their abilities.
For connoisseurs of Constitutional crises, this is the real thing.
Certainly, there is a need to safeguard classified information and the sources and methods used to collect and process it. But, beyond that, the public (and Congress) have a right to know how their blood and treasure is employed to protect the population and our enshrined freedoms.
Recent moves to make the press take what amount to a loyalty—and docility—oath and to accept the rule of apparatchiks whose qualifications are as questionable as their distaste for the American Way of government is palpable, appears to be part of an effort to bend our apolitical military to the current political winds.
And there will be some in uniform who support the Pentagon’s new strictures without thought. The roots of military suspicion of the press (but not suppression) go deep, although the relationship has matured notably in the age of long wars and not-quite-wars. The post-Vietnam hostility some of us felt a half-century ago has all but disappeared…although a measure of tension will always remain, due to our human ambitions, imperfections, and misunderstandings.
When I think back on my own smart-ass attitude toward the press as a junior officer, I find my naivety laughable. Just as those who have never served fail to grasp the incredible complexity of military operations, so I and my old peers had no inkling of the breadth of the media (so much vaster today), of its contradictions, dedication, cynicism, courage, indispensability, virtues, and flaws. We profited from great reporting but complained of earnest criticisms we read as personal affronts.
With the years and a succession of missions we—well, most of us—eventually realized that most journalists were doing their best to do their work just as we were committed to ours.
Composed of human beings, our military and the press will always be imperfect, and the digital age, with its festive cruelty and disregard for facts, poses grave new problems. Yet, during my military career and follow-on endeavors, I was only outright lied to by a single journalist. Eventually, I came around on journalists so completely that I leapt the wall and married one.
As with those in uniform, not all journalists are paragons of virtue. Ambition can drive men and women to blindness in the face of their own errors. In Iraq, for example, a very talented, supremely ambitious journalist was convinced that he knew better than the generals, and he clung fiercely to his theses. The result was that he praised the failing generals (there will be failing generals in any war, anywhere), while damning those who were getting it right. He savaged the reputations of good men—and recognized his folly far too late.
Yet, other journalists produced splendid work of great integrity and value. Overwhelmingly, they tried to do a solid, ethical job. The worst problems, inevitably, were with those who were green and just didn’t grasp the layers upon layers of environments in which they found themselves. Some reporting was shabby, but ignorance is not malevolence.
Now the new boss at the Pentagon wants to break a relationship that took decades to heal after the fall of Saigon. Today’s Pentagon reporters know their stuff and acquired their b.s. detectors the hard way, at war and not just in briefing rooms. We on the military side should be delighted at their professionalism. The American people should be pleased, too. The much-derided “mainstream media” remains a watchtower of freedom, sounding the alarm on threats to our way of life and explaining our engagement with the world to an imperfectly educated population.
Why does our self-anointed “Secretary of War” want to turn off the lights?
