Remarks by Tom Brokaw

Journalists Memorial Rededication Ceremony May 3, 2004

05.03.04

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The decision to go to war is the single most consequential action any society can undertake. War is about death. Spending lives and taking them. It is about the failure of reason and diplomacy. Wars can be just but never humane. As the war reporter Chris Hedges has written, passionately and critically, war carries its own myth. It is, he says, venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind.

For all those reasons — and the myth — war is an especially powerful narcotic for the press in all of its forms, and for the most passionate and dedicated members of the fraternity. When war is waged, all else goes below the fold. It is the big story of historic decisions, military strategy, technology, cruelty, separation, life, death and injury. It is also the story of what comes next.

And the reporters who go to the battlefield tell all those stories and more, usually at great personal risk, for battlefields are notorious for random death and injury during the fog of war. They are the scouts for the rest of us, the other reporters working their beats at central command or in the Pentagon, working the phones to the national security agencies. Their editors defer to their eyes and ears as they do on almost no other occasion because the front line reporters — and what they're seeing and hearing — are unique.

The best of those front line reporters share the DNA of the warriors with which they're working. They like to catch the bad guys; they prefer unconventional lives and they can live off the land. Most of all, they have no illusions about the work in which they're involved, the hard, confusing work of sorting out what's true and what's not. Making very tough decisions without losing your humanity. And forming the bonds of friendship through what the writer Paul Fussell has called the knothole of combat experience.

War reporting in recent years has become the subject of intense, often heated, examination and cross-examination. Is it too gung ho? Too one-sided? Too cynical? Too political? Too sentimental? Yes, it has been that and more. It also has been brilliant and insightful, a true portrait of the commanders making the right and wrong decisions, the grunts rising to heroic levels or sinking to unspeakable cruelty. The terrible pain of the innocents caught in the crossfire. Generalizations about war reporting, especially in the current climate of so much coverage in the press, on the air, over the satellite, on cable and on the Internet, are inherently unfair, for they fail to reflect the admirable as well as the repugnant.

We have a long and rich tradition of war reporting in this country, a wide range of styles and legacies, ranging from couriers in the revolutionary wars to Matthew Brady and Walt Whitman during the war between the states to dime novelists during the frontier wars to Hearst chain cheerleading during the Spanish-American war to Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Bill Mauldin during World War II, Keyes Beech, Marguerite Higgins, David Douglas Duncan during Korea; David Halberstam, Neal Sheehan, Peter Arnett, Gloria Emerson, Morley Safer, Eddie Adams, Michael Herr during Viet Nam; and so many others, including those we honor here today.

They continued that great tradition of going into the heart of darkness to shine the bright light of their intelligence, curiosity and empathy on the terrible events they were witnessing so we could better understand them.

War correspondents become brothers and sisters in a slightly dysfunctional family, not always in agreement, always competitive, cranky, funny, sad, angry and trying to the end to do the right thing for their viewers and readers, their profession, their colleagues, their family and their own code of honor.

And we cannot forget their families on this occasion. Those who are left only with their grief and their memories of so much better times. And those who live with anxiety about the fate of their loved ones in this continuing war. One of my friends from another network was the subject of a thoughtful and instructive magazine article about having a husband on assignment in Iraq. The preamble began, "Many days Lee Woodruff turns on the TV to see if her husband, Bob Woodruff, is still alive." So families, too, are part of this celebration, and not just in mourning.

Maybe one day this enduring and awful affliction of war will be deleted from the human condition, but until it is, thank God for the brave men and women who tell the awful and glorious truth of it.