Once considered the "best American newspaperman London has ever had," Edward Price Bell (1869--1943) helped invent the ideal of a professional foreign news service at the late and great Chicago Daily News, which in its heyday had the second-largest daily newspaper circulation in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, professional overseas reporting was still an experiment. The Chicago Daily News's visionary owner and publisher Victor Lawson was not certain how to organize the service or even what kind of news it should cover. Bell, who had distinguished himself as a young...

In the years following World War II, the United States suffered its most severe military and diplomatic reverses in Asia while Mao Zedong laid the foundation for the emergence of China as a major economic and military world power. As a correspondent for the International News Service, the Associated Press, and later for the New York Times, Seymour Topping documented on the ground the tumultuous events during the Chinese Civil War, the French Indochina War, and the American retreat from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In this riveting narrative, Topping chronicles his extraordinary experiences...

"There are few people in the world who have more opportunity for getting close to the hot interesting things of one's time than the special correspondent of a great paper," George Lynch, a veteran British correspondent, wrote in Impressions of a War Correspondent, published in 1903. He made it all sound glorious, just the way war correspondents like to recount their experiences on the battlefield. But in a few months he had less to exult about. Lynch and a distinguished throng of foreign correspondents with high hopes of a good story assembled in Tokyo to cover the Russo-Japanese War -- a...

On May 7, 1945, Associated Press reporter Ed Kennedy became the most famous -- or infamous -- American correspondent of World War II. On that day in France, General Alfred Jodl signed the official documents as the Germans surrendered to the Allies. Army officials allowed a select number of reporters, including Kennedy, to witness this historic moment -- but then instructed the journalists that the story was under military embargo. In a courageous but costly move, Kennedy defied the military embargo and broke the news of the Allied victory. His scoop generated instant controversy. Rival...

In the years following World War II, the United States suffered its most severe military and diplomatic reverses in Asia while Mao Zedong laid the foundation for the emergence of China as a major economic and military world power. As a correspondent for the International News Service, the Associated Press, and later for the New York Times, Seymour Topping documented on the ground the tumultuous events during the Chinese Civil War, the French Indochina War, and the American retreat from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In this riveting narrative, Topping chronicles his extraordinary experiences...

At the height of World War I, in the winter of 1917--1918, one of the Progressive era's most successful muckracking journalists, Ray Stannard Baker (1870--1946), set out on a special mission to Europe on behalf of the Wilson administration. While posing as a foreign correspondent for the New Republic and the New York World, Baker assessed public opinion in Europe about the war and postwar settlement. American officials in the White House and State Department held Baker's wide-ranging, trenchant reports in high regard. After the war, Baker remained in government service as the president's...