Word: knightley
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Journalist Phillip Knightley prefers his legends lightly tarnished. An earlier book, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, removed the romantic luster from combat journalism. The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century is a pickling look at the romantic past and bureaucratic present of the flourishing espionage business...
Understandably rough figures are offered in evidence. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. each spend more than $7.5 billion on intelligence services. The British tally is given at $900 million. The number of people directly or marginally employed in spooking is even more difficult to estimate, although Knightley confidently puts the minimum at 1.25 million...
...Knightley is hard to please. After conceding that correspondents like Charles Mohr, Malcolm Browne and David Halberstam were "courageous and skilled," he criticizes them for only questioning the effectiveness of the war and not American intervention itself...
Moreover, the smooth Fleet Street professional is not without his own inadequacies. His preferences are understandable. The flamboyant correspondents make livelier copy than Knightley's accounts of Edward R. Murrow, A.J. Liebling, Alan Moorehead and Ernie Pyle-men who muffled the "boom-boom" in favor of the human voice. But as every journalist learns, readability has its casualties...
After some hairsplitting qualifications, he anoints as the first modern war correspondent William Howard Russell, who wrote the account of the charge of the Light Brigade-and later performed brilliantly during the U.S. Civil War. Had he been educated by the Russian side, Knightley might have recalled that a young second lieutenant brought the horrors of the Crimean War home to Moscow with his articles from Sevastopol. They miraculously passed through the censors untouched, and bore the byline Leo Tolstoy. R.Z. Sheppard