Edward Kennedy

Edward L. Kennedy (June 26, 1905 – November 29, 1963)

Breaking the news The documents for Germany's surrender in World War II were signed on May 7, 1945, at 2:41 a.m. local time at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims, France. The surrender was subject to a time delay to ensure compliance across the entire theater, and was to take effect at 23.01 on May 8. Edward Kennedy, as the AP's Paris bureau chief, had been among a group of reporters hastily assembled aboard a C-47 aircraft, and told only when aloft that they were to cover the official signing. All of the journalists on the plane were asked to pledge that they would embargo the story until SHAEF had issued its own official announcement of the event; Kennedy complied. After the ceremony, however, the public relations officers told the reporters that instead of a few hours of embargo, they were being asked by Eisenhower to hold the news for 36 more hours until after a second surrender ceremony, this one to take place in Berlin, the German capital. The military officials explained that it was deemed important that the surrender be made by the heads of the German Armed Forces, not merely their representatives, and that the Germans formally surrender to the Soviets, as well as the Western Allies, something the Nazis were trying to avoid.

Aftermath Kennedy would later write that he had respected previous embargoes because they were related to military security, but that the embargo of the surrender news was simply political. Kennedy himself had witnessed Soviet General Ivan Susloparov sign the instruments of surrender in Reims. He concluded, correctly, that the Soviets were insisting on a formal signing ceremony in Berlin for what amounted to propaganda reasons, and the Allies had agreed to wait until that took place to appease Stalin. Initially Kennedy was kept on the payroll but given no work to do, eventually being fired in November. The following summer, the military acknowledged that SHAEF had not simply permitted the German broadcast, but ordered it, and that it had been made almost two hours before Kennedy's dispatch. According to Time, the incident gave the press a black eye and "strengthened the censor's hand".

Later life

After the war Kennedy became the managing editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, and three years later in 1949 he was hired by The Monterey Peninsula Herald as the associate editor, eventually serving as editor and associate publisher. Kennedy was struck by a car on November 24, 1963, and died five days later at the age of 58. A monument to Kennedy stands in Laguna Grande Park in Seaside, California, with an inscription referring to his famous scoop: "He gave the world an extra day of happiness."

During his later years, Kennedy composed a memoir of his years as a World War II correspondent but was not able to locate a publishing company. His accounts were eventually published in 2012 by his daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, under the title Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship & The Associated Press, which chronicled his early days as a stringer in Paris to his firing from the Associated Press.