A Week of Agony; A Consul Is Murdered
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down still kept filling the blood banks. Children still went to
a school, usually in a cellar; mothers dashed out to serve as
nurses or as civil guards, leaving their offsprings at nurseries.
THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF A CORRESPONDENT
BY THIS time the American correspondents were almost
beside themselves at their helplessness. Their colorful, dramatic stories of the defense of Jerusalem, of the breaching
of Zion Gate, the miraculous Jewish successes on the Jerusalem fronts and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians—
all piled up in wire baskets on the censors' desks, and remained there. Displaying no sense of public relations,
Haganah press officials thought only in stiff military terms.
Jim Fitzsimmons and Tom Pringle, the Associated Press
photographers, and Robert Hecox, the Paramount News
cameraman, probably suffered most. Jim and Tom took hundreds of photographs, neatly captioned and carefully wrapped
their precious negatives, and hopefully turned them in. Nothing happened. The negatives gathered dust side by side with
the dead copy of the correspondents.
Hecox was bursting to have the exclusive material he had
shot developed and shown in American theaters. One night—I suspect he was fortified with a bottle or two of beer—he set
out on foot with his camera and film, determined to walk
across the mine fields and enemy lines to the Old City, thence
to Amman to mail his stuff home.
"Good-bye!" Bob said.
"So long, Bob. Hope you make it."
Three hours later he was back, unhurt, with his camera
and film intact. He was considerably sobered up and went
right to bed.
What I attempted the next day was even more rattlebrained, because I tried it in daylight. I don't know what pos-