3.when Generals Sue (June/july 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 4)

3.when Generals Sue

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Authors: Joseph H. Cooper

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June/july 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 4

War is hell—and so is the coverage of war. Gen. William Westmoreland and former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, claiming injury as a result of press reports, retaliated with batteries of lawyers armed with videotapes, classified documents, and loaded depositions. Have the risks of soldiering taken on new dimensions in the last half of the twentieth century? Are the reporters, the editors, the publishers, the producers of recent decades so antagonistic that they provoke unprecedented courtroom battles? How else can a military man combat his detractors? Is a libel lawsuit the best way to counterattack?

Military leaders have been coming under fire from the press for some time. General Westmoreland is not the first to find his estimates of enemy troop strength challenged by journalists, and General Sharon is not the first to be accused of allowing a slaughter.

Without defending or excusing either the CBS documentary on Westmoreland (‘The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception”) or the Time cover story on Sharon (“Verdict on the Massacre: The Verdict Is Guilty”), one can suggest to these two generals that the media could have been employed to provide recourse and remedy superior to that afforded by the law of libel.

One hundred and twenty years ago Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman found himself assailed by various Northern newspapers because they considered his appraisals of Confederate troop strength and resolve to be unduly pessimistic. A New York Tribune correspondent wrote of Sherman’s “gloomy overestimates” of Southern forces and of “broad insinuations that Sherman’s mind was upset.”

A Chicago Tribune reporter criticized Sherman for what he judged to be excessive caution, a reluctance to engage the enemy: “I know not whether it is insanity or not, but the General…indulged in remarks that made his loyalty doubtful. He even spoke despondingly; said the rebels could never be whipped; talked of a thirty years’ war.” The Cincinnati Commercial elaborated on these criticisms of his Kentucky command, finding that Sherman had “frightened” Union men “almost out of their wits by the most astounding representation of [the enemy’s] overwhelming force and the assertion that Louisville could not be defended.”

Newspaper criticism did not stop with comments on Sherman’s judgment. The Chicago Tribune , for example, said he was “possessed of neither mind nor manners.” A correspondent who had written that the general’s manners were like those of a Pawnee Indian decided that he had been unfair; a few days later he apologized to the Pawnees.

It was, of course, more understandable that the enemy would attack Sherman. Southern newspapers condemned him for the burning and plundering that marked his army’s march through Georgia. The Atlanta Constitution wrote of his “inhuman and ferocious conduct” and the Milledgeville, Georgia, paper spoke of his “vandal hordes.” The Macon Telegraph called Sherman, who in 1860 had been the superintendent of a newly established military academy in Louisiana, a Judas Iscariot with “all