Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else
By Reporters of the Associated Press, with a foreword by David Halberstam
Princeton Architectural Press
432 pages, $35

In this multi-authored new history of the Associated Press, Larry Heinzerling refers to his fellow foreign correspondents as “the infantry of international journalism.” In fact, the term “infantry” could be applied to the whole corps of AP staffers, past and present; they have served as journalism’s foot soldiers, reporting what needs to be reported, even when the world isn’t necessarily paying close attention, and even when it doesn’t provide them with much in the way of riches or glamour. In its century and a half as a nonprofit cooperative, the AP has produced relatively few celebrity journalists; indeed, staffers didn’t even get bylines until the 1920s.

The AP has chosen a workable strategy for this volume, assigning its veteran reporters to tell war stories, in both the literal and the broader sense, about other reporters, preserving the tales and lore of, primarily, the AP’s work in the twentieth century. This means that credit is at last given to many who did brave but unacknowledged work, and that those who blundered are not spared. There are dozens of pictures from AP photographers, who have won a good many more Pulitzers than the reporters, and a warm recollection by David Halberstam of his friends at the distinguished AP Saigon bureau of the early 1970s.

The United States v. I. Lewis Libby
Edited and with reporting by Murray Waas, with additional editing and reporting by Jeff Lomonaco
Union Square Press
584 pages, $12.95 paper

Murray Waas, a disciple of Jack Anderson, the ultimate outsider, has assembled a plump volume of the trial and grand-jury records in the case of...

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