A War Correspondent Confronts Truth

Today while waiting for my doctor’s appointment, I happened to be reading Fintan O’Toole’s article for the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a recently published collection of letters written by Martha Gellhorn between 1930 and 1949. The title of the article was “A Moral Witness,” and most of the letters in the collection dealt with Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent.

To many Gellhorn may be known better as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. Hemingway, of course, also wrote about war. While his texts may have followed the stylistic lead of journalism, Hemingway himself was no journalist. Indeed, O’Toole calls him “one of the great spinners of self-aggrandizing narratives,” which is probably the best way to summarize his fiction. Gellhorn, on the other hand, was “the real deal” among journalists that chose to cover battles. Like Hemingway, she followed the Spanish Civil War; but, decades later, she was still “in the game,” going off to cover Vietnam in 1966, much to the consternation of all those government influencers that kept sending more and more of our troops there.

However, it was back in the days of the Spanish Civil War that Gellhorn realized that not everyone believed that truth was an ideal to be pursued in either journalism or any other genre of writing. Reflecting on that time in 1959, she wrote in one of her letters:

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

It today’s context, one might almost say that her characterization of lies was a bit too polite. It may, indeed, be a habit, but not necessarily one that is either “homey” or “appetizing.” Rather, it is a habit like addiction, not only filling the vast space of cognitive capacity but also determined to make sure that no truths share that space.

Gellhorn died in 1998. She never got to experience either the horror of 9/11 or the military nightmares of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps that was why she never quite grasped just how addictive lies can be and how much damage they can cause. In the context of the current Presidential campaigns, O’Toole’s article could not have been better timed.