Flag-draped memories: the strange history of war death imagery.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

THREE MONTHS AFTER the war began, a New York newspaper bitterly attacked the administration's handling of unpleasant military news. "Their 'information' is treacle for children," thundered the angry editorialist, who compared the military's growing edifice of information control to the work of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Other publications agreed that war news was being "dry-cleaned" by the government, which had yet to release a single image of an American military death. Indeed, there were rumors that a paranoid White House was planting informants in newsrooms and even tapping reporters' phones. It was 1942.

You'll find that portrait of an earlier generation of wartime Americans, their press, and their government in George Roeder's invaluable study The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (1993). One lesson to be taken is that Americans don't entirely trust their state, even when it is engaged in an effort that most of them support. That is especially true when the state's effort is military, as the recent controversy concerning images of Iraq's flag-draped coffins and thus the struggle over the control of war imagery--illustrates once again.

The struggle for war image control began when a camera was first aimed at soldiers in Crimea, but that struggle is hardly founded on the absolutes implied by arguments like the one over the war coffins. The simple version of this and similar debates--that the state must hide its dead or risk growing opposition to its war--is a misleading simplification of a complex phenomenon. Yet both the state, which wants to limit these images' exposure, and war critics, who want them disseminated, are acting as if the reaction to such images is Pavlovian.

The historic role of war imagery is actually filled with contradictions. The state doesn't always try to hide its war dead; sometimes it is anxious to display them. Viewers of such images are not always repelled or demoralized by them; they have had many other reactions, including an increased support for war. The press is not always anxious to reproduce such images for either sensational or political purposes; it may well prefer to ignore them entirely. The war images we see are not always documentary evidence of war's carnage; some famous images may well have been misidentified, and some photographers have even arranged and rearranged the dead like so many props. For that matter, images, however harrowing, are not necessarily...