Hail and Farewell

This afternoon, President Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to Joe Galloway, a longtime friend and colleague at U.S. News & World Report and later at the Knight Ridder and McClatchy news companies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2025/01/02/president-biden-announces-recipients-of-the-presidential-citizens-medal/

It’s an occasion to celebrate the life and work of one of America’s greatest reporters and war correspondents, but sadly, also to “measure what we’ve lost”, as Paul Simon wrote in “The Dangling Conversation”.

What we’re losing is the kind of reporting and writing that Joe did, the kind of trust between journalists and their subjects and audiences that he built and, above all, the respect that he and his work earned and that the news media continue losing to technology, ignorance, economics and timidity.

First, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that he had no “higher education”, Joe was a gifted writer. In the autumn of 1989, U.S. News produced “A Portrait of America”, painted by eight reporters and editors who returned to their hometowns. Joe went back to Refugio, Texas, the home of his beloved Bobcats, and this is how he began his report:

“The land endures, that broad, impossibly flat sweep of Texas coastal plain where you can see forever, see everything, see nothing. It is harsh country, a place of extremes where Darwinian law outfits survivors with thorns, fangs, stings or, at a minimum, thick skins.”

Here is the opening stanza of “Vietnam Story”, his 1990 U.S. News cover story on the 1965 battle between units of the Army’s 7th Cavalry Division and the People’s Army of Vietnam in South Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley that won a National Magazine Award, the magazine equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize.

“As the Sun rose on November 14, 1965, a clear, hot Sunday, four U.S. Army helicopters flew, as unobtrusively as such machines can, across the rugged Ia Drang Valley in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Below them was a wild and desolate place that in normal times offered a living only to elephants, tigers, and a few Montagnard tribesmen. Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore scanned the terrain intently, scribbling notes and marking his maps.”

https://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/05/16/vietnam-story

That article was the foundation of We Were Soldiers Once — and Young, the book Joe wrote with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, the U.S. commander in the Ia Drang. https://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Soldiers-Once-Young/dp/0679411585/ref=asc_df_0679411585?tag=bingshoppinga-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80126963826563&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=m&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4583726549810628&psc=1

The book, in turn, was the basis of Randall Wallace’s movie We Were Soldiers, in which Barry Pepper portrays Joe. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0277434/

Even in this age of technologically-induced attention deficit disorder and information overload, that kind of writing leaves you wanting more.

Both those paragraphs also reflect the second element of Joe’s unmatched career. They describe wild, desolate and dangerous places that could intimidate lesser mortals. Not Joe. He was not fearless: No one lives without fear. But with the possible exception of his wife, Doc Gracie, who accepted his medal today, no place, no one, and no thing could ever intimidate Joe Galloway.

In April of 1971, when the Pakistani military regime ordered all foreign journalists to leave what now is Bangladesh, Rashidul Islam Rubel wrote in his obituary of Joe in the publication NewAge, Joe “feigned illness; subsequently he sneaked out of Pakistani custody, risked his life, walked a couple of miles and took shelter in the U.S. Consulate”.

And try though he did, Donald Rumsfeld could not bully Joe, either.

After working as an advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Joe reenlisted in journalism in the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder, the now-extinct company that in its day owned more than 30 regional and local newspapers from Miami to Anchorage. He joined Jonathan Landay, now at Reuters, and Warren Strobel, who’s just joined The Washington Post, to help produce the skeptical, lonely and often unwelcome reporting that challenged the Bush administration’s bogus case for invading Iraq.

That team’s work was the basis of Joe’s second movie, Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe, in which fellow Texan Tommy Lee Jones plays Joe. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5540992/

When Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld tired of Joe’s columns questioning the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, he summoned Joe to his office on the Pentagon’s E-Ring for a one-on-one meeting.

When Joe got there, he found Rumsfeld with a Praetorian Guard of four or five other top officials. “Good,” Joe told his colleagues later. “I had ‘em surrounded.”

When Rumsfeld accused him of relying only on retired officers as sources, Joe said that wasn’t true. Many of them were on active duty, he said, and “some of ‘em might even be in this room.”

When he returned to the bureau and was asked if that was true, Joe’s reply was vintage Galloway: “No,” he said, “but it was fun watching ‘em sweat like whores in church.”

One can only imagine Joe meeting another Donald, this time in the Oval Office. Even if Elon Musk joined the fray, it would not be a fair fight, and the contrast to newspaper owners vetoing presidential endorsements and TV celebrities making pilgrimages to Mar a Lago could not be sharper.

Finally, like soldiers, policemen, firefighters — and good reporters — Joe always ran toward the sound of trouble. Today, as we saw in the often lame coverage of last year’s presidential election, too many reporters, editors and owners freeze in the face of threats, run from them or kowtow to the bullies who issue them.

None of that, however, is what we — and our country and every place where people yearn for the truth — have lost.

There are still great writers and courageous journalists, as we’ve seen again in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza and Sudan and, sadly, in our own cities and towns.

What we have lost is a reporter who wrote for the people who get sent to war, and for their mothers and fathers, their husbands and wives, their sons and their daughters, not for the people who send other people’s kids to war.

Joe respected honor, courage and commitment — performance and persistence, not pedigrees or pedagogues.

His best sources were downrange — sergeants and lieutenants, not just folks with stars on their shoulders or stars in their eyes, although he knew them, too, and they knew — and respected — him.

He had no use for what he called REMFs —rear echelon motherf*ckers, for those not familiar with military acronyms. Again, one can only imagine what he would make of the incoming administration.

Joe’s last combat assignment was to help U.S. News cover Operation Desert Storm in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait. He was dispatched to the headquarters of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander whom Joe had marched with back when Schwarzkopf was an Army captain in Vietnam. When Schwarzkopf summoned Joe, he said: “I know what you want, and I’m going to give it to you.”

Schwarzkopf dispatched Joe to the headquarters of the 24th Infantry Division up on the Saudi-Iraqi border. When he got there, Joe recalled, he was escorted to the division’s tactical operations center, where officers were being briefed, complete with maps and timelines, on the plans for a “left hook” attack more than 300 miles through Iraq down to Basra.

Joe was surprised to be allowed into such a detailed classified briefing, but when he asked Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the division commander, why, McCaffrey’s answer was simple, and it exemplified the respect Joe had earned.

“Because you’re going with us,” Joe recalled McCaffrey saying.

His respect for the military and his love for our country did not deter him from reporting failures and flaws, though. He wrote about racism in the ranks, bogus cases for war and the absence of planning that left missions unaccomplished and lives wasted. In fact, it was his love for those who bear the burden, in the field and at home, that inspired his criticisms.

He was a major contributor to Triumph Without Victory, U.S. News’s warts-and-all recounting of the Gulf War, a title that sadly could be recycled to cover the subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Without-Victory-Unreported-History/dp/0812919483

Joe wrote to inform people, not to impress them. He wrote about what he saw and heard, not about what he thought. It was never his goal in life to become a regular on Sunday talk shows or in the “Spotted” columns of Politico.

He looked his readers in the eye, not down on them. 

As gifted with words as he was — maybe that was the Irish in him — he wrote, as one of his friends said after he died, in the vernacular. Maybe that was because when he was still a teenager, he went to work at the Victoria Advocate in Texas instead of to college — a decision that probably would prevent him from getting a job in journalism today — contributed to that.

Unlike too many columnists, influencers and podcasters today, he blew the whistle, not his own horn. He wrote his account of the incident for which the Army awarded him the Bronze Star with a V device for valor mostly in the first person plural: “We all ran out into the burning grass. . . We carried him into the aid station.”

Journalism will miss you, Joe, more than ever in the forthcoming four years. Most of all, in this hour when the truth too often is considered relative or subordinate to politics or prejudice or ideology, your country will miss you.

This update includes an embarrassing correction: Joe helped cover the Gulf War for U.S. News, not for Knight Ridder. I should have caught that because I was the one who sent him. Thanks to our old boss Mimi McLaughlin and to Susan V for catching that.