Newsmen a National Defence

The bulk of the 11 pieces in this collection, drawn primarily from Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College, are balanced discussions of the collision of press and military interests, a clash that dates to the time of George Washington, as historian William Hammond points out in an excellent overview. Two level-headed and practical essays come from journalist Richard Halloran, who punctures the image of a monolithic media monster put forth by some contributors. Taken in tandem with nuts and bolts reports like Col. Barry Willey's and former Deputy Defense Secretary Fred Hoffman's on the operation of press pools, the two Halloran pieces form the book's core, offering empirical evidence on the way the press behaves in wartime. Bernard Trainor, having been both a commanding officer and a New York Times correspondent, has uniquely sympathetic insight into the press-military wrangle from both sides. The message of the more probing essays is that while an adversarial relationship between the military and the press is perhaps unavoidable, the system works best when both sides attempt to meet the other's needs. Matthews co-edited The Challenge of Military Leadership. (Oct.)