Posted on 02/22/2007 8:20:27 AM PST by aculeus
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is the product of extensive research in archives and secondary sources, as well as consultation with other historians who are specialists in naval air combat in the Pacific on both sides. Individuals like John Lundstrom, Barrett Tillman, and James Sawruk not only looked at the same official records I did but, in the case of Lundstrom and Tillman, also interviewed surviving pilots and read letters and diaries. For the sake of brevity and accessibility, this article does not attempt to discuss the sources in detail, but a much longer narrative, along with many of the key documents supporting the conclusions offered here, can be read at www.weeklystandard.com. There are, of course, hundreds of pages of documents that could be deemed relevant if one included all the records I and my colleagues looked at that do not mention Polk when they should have if he had done what he claimed.
George W. Polk was honored as a truth-teller. A correspondent for CBS News, he was murdered in Greece in 1948. A coveted, respected award named after him, the George Polk Award, was established in 1949 and is given every year to journalists in numerous specialties. According to a statement on the official website, the winners have exemplified the unearthing of "myriad forms of scandal and deceit." They comprise a two-generation roll call of distinguished names in journalism: Christiane Amanpour, Homer Bigart, Walter Cronkite, Thomas Friedman, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Bill Moyers, Edward R. Murrow, Daniel Schorr, I.F. Stone, and many others.
Polk cut a dashing figure as a newsman, but he also cut out the real story of his World War II service as a naval officer and replaced it with a huge fraud. He deserves to join the growing roster of American journalists whose dishonesty has gravely injured their profession.
Who killed Polk remains a mystery. His body, drugged, bound, and shot in the head at close range, washed up in Salonika Bay during the Greek civil war of the late 1940s. Journalists widely believed that he died in fearless pursuit of a story. Polk was brave, and he wasn't reticent about his exploits. As a newsman, he often regaled his family and fellow journalists with tales of his exploits as a World War II fighter pilot and ace.
The mystery of Polk's death inspired at least three books in the United States, as well as some in Greece. In The Polk Conspiracy, journalist and human rights activist Kati Marton recounts how Polk told his family that he had been a fighter pilot who shot down 11 Japanese planes and earned a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds. In The Salonika Bay Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair, Princeton University professor Edmund Keeley presents Polk as a Navy fighter pilot in the South Pacific, a twice-wounded recipient of a "presidential unit citation." Interestingly, Elias Vlanton and Zak Mettger's Who Killed George Polk? mentions only Polk's claims of flying bomber and reconnaissance missions, not the wounds or the planes shot down. Judging from the correspondence and tributes included in his personal papers, deposited at New York University Library, Polk's glorious war record helped him get--and keep--his reporter's job at CBS. When Polk's reporting in Greece was challenged, Larry LeSueur, a CBS anchorman, defended Polk as a "wartime Navy fighter pilot twice wounded over Guadalcanal." After Polk's death in May 1948, CBS's legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow eulogized him as a hero who had "flown both fighters and bombers for the Navy during the war, was wounded in the Solomons and decorated for bravery."
None of this was true. Official documents reflect no evidence that Polk flew fighters in combat, much less that he shot down any Japanese planes. In fact, they demonstrate he was not even a qualified Navy pilot. Likewise, these records contain no evidence he was wounded, or that his decorations support his combat flying claims. Polk's actual service was admirable, but his later stories burgeoned into a fantastic deception.
I first became curious about Polk's stories reading a review of Kati Marton's book, in a September 1991 New York Review of Books, which described Polk as a "fighter pilot." I had recently published a history of the Guadalcanal campaign, and I had run across Polk in my researches--not as a fighter pilot, but as a junior officer supervising aircraft servicing. The work was hazardous--Polk's unit was set up at Guadalcanal's Henderson Field, which was routinely bombed and shelled by the Japanese. But it involved fueling and fixing combat aircraft, not flying them. The assertion in Marton's book that he had shot down 11 planes was patently false. That would have made him the highest-scoring ace in the U.S. Navy in 1942--a fact that would not have gone undocumented.
[see link for remainder of article]
Are you sure about this?
This is hugh!
But...but...Kinkos didn't exist during WWII, so how is Danny boy going to get the records? Amazing that both of them worked for cBS, ain't it? This says a lot about their corporate hiring practices for newsmen/war heroes doesn't it.
I'm just glad someone posted this on Free Republic.
Most telling is the third from last graf of the linked article, where the author described his attempts to peddle the article to the New Yorker, WaPo, and other MSM outlets.
Not surprisingly, the editors there declined -- I suspect because the article kicks over a few applecarts.
over-glorification of military record or outright fraud?
And, as the author suggests, journalists like to expose frauds ... unless the fraudster is a canonized journalist-saint.
It says in the article that he was a reporter, and a liar. Why would you expect the redundant explanation that he was a Democrat?
Just another lying reporter. They should create a Walter Duranty Award for these shysters.
He glorified Stalin and denied the deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine. Needless to say, he won a Pulitzer.
AMEN!
"over-glorification of military record or outright fraud?"
Over glorification of military record to a degree that amounts to outright fraud.
Oh, it's fraud all right. He was wearing pilots wings and other decorations to which he had no right.
The fact that a prestigious old media news award is named after him is oddly satisfying.
Probably. There was even a Democrat President in the family, James K. Polk. George's brother, William Roe Polk was in the State Department in the 1960s and wrote a family history.
Who just happens to be the ex-wife of one Peter Jennings.
Funny how it all ties together.
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Iraq-Practical-Plan-Withdrawal/dp/1416534563/sr=8-1/qid=1172186558/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-0384264-2419610?ie=UTF8&s=books
The same William R. Polk who co-authored "Out of Iraq" with George McGovern?
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