Urging intervention ... Edward R Murrow
Should you, shouldn't you? Is evil to be confronted or, vaguely, contained? A significant number of you reading this will be hostile to the invasion of Iraq but a book published this week obliquely puts the case for intervention, writes Erlend Clouston. I say obliquely, because the words "Rumsfeld", "Baghdad" and "homeland security" feature nowhere in the 209 pages that make up Broadcasts From The Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War (Potomac, £16.95). Author Philip Seib merely documents how US public and political opinion was gradually persuaded that it made sense, in moral and practical terms, to confront trouble sooner rather than later.
The parallels with today are not exact, but they are close enough to be disconcerting. Because we were the ones threatened then, we read now with distaste of the peace-mongery of the hero airman Charles Lindbergh and the doom-mongery of US ambassador Joe Kennedy who bluntly told the State Department: "I cannot impress upon you strongly enough my complete lack of confidence in the entire conduct of the war." Seymour Hersh says the same thing in 2006 and we applaud. I can see the sneer forming on your lips when I report that 61% of Americans told pollsters, effectively, good riddance, after the fall of France. What cowardy-custards they were! Thank goodness for people like Murrow whose broadcasts, whispering in the ear of America in a way newspapers never could, encouraged its citizens to put their war machine at our disposal.
One man's anti-Bush agitator is another man's isolationist. In the 10 months before Roosevelt sent his cavalry to the rescue, Seib reports, "interventionists aired 68 (radio) programmes and isolationists aired 72." Do we care that Murrow's own vivid and courageous commentaries resulted, ultimately, in the carpet-bombing of German cities? Not a hoot, I would suggest. From this distance, the deaths of 291,557 US servicemen seems a not-unreasonable trade-off for the defeat of international fascism.
Seib, a former broadcaster himself and now professor of journalism at Marquette University, strays as far as he dare into the analogy. "The propriety of armed intervention is... still debated," he notes, talking of the unpleasantnesses that have "proved lethal to cultures in central Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere." Hitler or Hussein? It's your call. Now back to the World Cup...
