The year was 1992. The day was Dec. 8. The scene was the Pentagon briefing room, where a neophyte reporter with no military experience stood in front of a large wall-sized National Geographic world map and prepared to explain what was happening in Somalia to an international audience.
The reporter, having arrived and taken up residence in the fabled Correspondents Corridor only four weeks earlier, was facing his first test to show CNN, which was still basking in the glow of its coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that sending someone known for punny feature stories to cover the Pentagon wasn’t a serious mistake.
Then-President George H.W. Bush was still in office, having lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton. But before leaving office, Bush ordered one last military action, “Operation Restore Hope,” a humanitarian mission to get food to the famished population in war-torn Somalia.
Watching a live feed from the CNN cameras on the beaches of Mogadishu, it would be the 39-year-old rookie’s job to provide play-by-play to complement CNN’s reporters on the scene, a daunting task for anyone without a deep well of military expertise.
But standing beside him, just off camera, was a young Navy public affairs officer, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Gradisher, who was watching the grainy thermal images along with him.
“Joe, what’s this hovercraft coming ashore?” the reporter asked.
“That’s what’s known as an LCAC,” Gradisher replied.
“An LCAC? What’s that?” the reporter asked.
“It stands for Landing Craft Air Cushioned,” Gradisher replied.
“And what would be on it?” the reporter asked.
“It carries Marines and light armored vehicles,” Gradisher replied.
Suddenly, the reporter heard the voice of CNN’s senior anchor Bernie Shaw in his earpiece.
“Let’s go now to our man at the Pentagon, Jamie McIntyre. What are we seeing here?” Shaw said.
“Well, Bernie, that hovercraft approaching the shore is what’s known as an LCAC, and it would be carrying Marines and their light armored vehicles and that kind of thing,” I said in the most authoritative voice I could muster.
While the studio switched to a report from Mogadishu, I asked Gradisher, “What’s that ship we can just see on the horizon?”
“That’s the USS Mount Whitney,” Gradisher said.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“It’s a command-and-control ship, directing the air traffic and serving as a floating command center,” Gradisher said.
Again, Shaw threw it to me at the Pentagon.
“Bernie, I’m not sure you can see this, but on the horizon there’s a U.S. warship, and if I’m not mistaken, that’s the USS Mount Whitney, a command-and-control ship, which is serving as a floating command center,” I said.
And so it went all night.
When I got home late that evening, I asked my wife if she had watched me on CNN.
“I did,” she said, pausing before asking, “How did you know all that stuff?”
“Honey, it’s my job to know all that stuff,” I replied.
What I should have said was, “Honey, there’s a whole building full of military and civilian public affairs officers whose job it is to make sure I know all that stuff.”
That night was my introduction to the surprisingly transparent and mutually respectful relationship between the military and media, in what I believe was the only military headquarters in the world that allowed reporters to have offices inside the building and access almost anywhere they wanted within the Pentagon’s 17 1/2 miles of corridors.
Yes, War Secretary Pete Hegseth was right about that.
It was true. When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January, reporters were basically free to roam the hallways of the building, as they had for more than 80 years.
In fact, for much of its history, the building was pretty much open to the public, like any other government office building.
The Pentagon even featured a shopping concourse that included one of Washington, D.C.’s, most popular department stores.
However, while reporters were free to walk the halls, they were unable to enter any classified areas without an escort, such as the “Tank,” the secure briefing room used by the Joint Chiefs, or the National Military Command Center, located in the subbasement of the building.
In recent years, reporters were also barred from the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club, lest unclothed journalists might go unrecognized and overhear locker room chatter from loose-lipped officers.
The openness of the Pentagon was, as the cliché goes, not a bug, but a feature.
It fostered a healthy relationship between two natural adversaries, a government with a legitimate right to protect necessary secrets, and a press whose job is to ferret out the truth even if it angers or embarrasses the military or its civilian leaders.
And it worked remarkably well.
Just ask any of the previous defense secretaries I covered over the past three decades. To a man — and they were all men — they left with warm words for the Pentagon press corps.
“Probably the most professional operation that I’ve witnessed consistently has been all of you,” former Vice President Dick Cheney said in his farewell remarks to reporters.
“The press is not the enemy and to treat it as such is self-defeating,” former War Secretary Bob Gates said in a speech at the Naval Academy.
The Pentagon was, and still is, really a beat that runs on sources, but what might surprise some jaundiced media critics is what’s behind those so-called “leaks.”
More often than not, sources at the Pentagon are very senior officers, or military or civilian public affairs officers whose job it is to interact with reporters and who have what is known as “release authority.”
That is to say, they are authorized to speak for their services or areas of expertise, and almost always, the nonpublic information they provide is in an effort to help reporters get their story right by supplying additional facts or context.
Because there are (or were) dozens of reporters interacting with dozens of officials every day in the Pentagon, relationships develop.
Public Affairs officers get to know which reporters they can trust to be fair, even when a story is bad news, and reporters get to know which sources are straight shooters.
For both the journalists and their sources, credibility is the coin of the realm, and the fact that the two sides lived and worked together fostered a culture of trust and mutual respect, even when we didn’t see things the same way.
I know the openness made me a better reporter, especially in my early years.
Anything I wanted to know, there was someone there who would explain it to me, whether it was policy or just how weapons worked.
Suppression of enemy air defenses? There was an Air Force officer ready to teach me the differences between air search radar and target acquisition radar, and at the same time explain how radar-seeking HARM missiles worked.
When I asked for a good way to explain the difference between dumb bombs and smart bombs, he chided me, “We don’t call them dumb bombs anymore. They’re directionally challenged.”
That’s what passed for humor back before the demonization of the legacy media tarred them as “fake news” and “enemies of the people.”
Pentagon reporters develop deep expertise over time — some who’ve spent years on the beat end up knowing more about some arcane subjects than the officials who brief them.
The best reporters — and there are many of them covering the Pentagon, too many to name — strive to be accurate, balanced, and fair, while aggressively holding government officials to account.
It’s not an easy task. Critics either accuse you of being too deferential to the military or too sensational, looking for scandals and failing to provide context.
My goal was always to try to earn the respect of the people I covered and the people I worked for, which I sincerely believe I was largely able to pull off over my 30-plus years on the beat.
The new Pentagon access rules, which sharply limit where reporters can go and whom they can talk to, have ended an era in which the five-sided building was a shining example of a uniquely American commitment to press freedom.
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But reporters, including my colleagues at the Washington Examiner, will still seek to uphold the highest standards of journalism, even if the Pentagon is now just another big, opaque government office building.
They just won’t be chatting up people in the halls.
