Chapter 2
Grenada

At approximately 9:00 A.M., the morning of October 25, 1983, United States forces invaded Grenada. Days before, President Maurice Bishop was overthrown in a military coup in which he was executed and over 100 of his supporters massacred in St. George, the nation's capital. The Communist government of Grenada had been a major Cold War concern of the Reagan administration since its first days in the White House, and the coup turned a nagging problem into what they saw as an emergency situation. Approximately 1000 American citizens were in Grenada, 700 of whom were medical students at St. George University. Immediately after the massacre in Grenada's capital, a ship-load of U.S. Marines heading towards Lebanon were diverted to the Caribbean.

Forced to shift their attention away from the recent bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Reagan and his advisors quickly planned and assembled the largest American military operation since the Vietnam War. As stated by the President, the Secretary of State, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the American mission on Grenada was to find and rescue American medical students, rescue Governor General Paul Scoons who had been jailed by the new regime, and to neutralize the Grenadian People's Revolutionary Army and secure the island. Though it was never officially stated by the administration or the military, another objective of the Grenada invasion was the military's intention to maintain maximum control over information coming in and out of the island by not allowing the press anywhere near Grenada until "Operation Urgent Fury" was well over. By October 28, the military had achieved its goals on Grenada, and though members of the American press were furious at having been unequivocally excluded from a military operation for the first time in the history of American warfare, the American public was overwhelmingly supportive of the invasion as well as the restraints placed on the press. In a televised speech announcing the completion of the operation's military objectives, President Reagan told the American people that Grenada was "a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy... We got there just in time."

Since the days of Big Stick diplomacy, American forces have intervened in Latin America so many times and in so many places that, in most respects, Grenada was hardly extraordinary. What made this invasion remarkable, however, were the unprecedented restraints placed on the press. As many journalists interpret history, "Grenada stands out as the first American military operation ever to leave the press behind with the explicit aim of assuring that only the 'official' picture of combat got out." It was a military operation in which history was "poured into moulds and marketed like chocolate kisses." For a long time after Operation Urgent Fury, the world still knew more about the island's nutmeg than the invasion that had just taken place against it.

As word of the invasion spread, the American media immediately began scrambling for the best vantage points. Without permission to be on the island and given no assistance in getting there, journalists were forced to employ creative methods to get the story. Despite the military's blockade, six reporters and a photographer were able to slip into Grenada aboard a small fishing boat just as the operation started. These reporters, however, were promptly detained by the U.S. military and airlifted to the USS Guam under the impression that they would be able to file their stories using the ship's facilities. Instead, "the reporters found themselves, as [one from the Miami Herald] put it, 'more or less captives of the U.S. Navy,' forbidden to send their stories and unable to get back to Grenada until Thursday." On Wednesday, CBS correspondent Sandy Gilmour chartered a plane and got the first non-government supplied pictures of Naval activity around Grenada before he was chased away by American jet fighters. Others who chartered boats to Grenada were warned away by shots fired from U.S. Navy aircraft and arrested if they reached the island. Even ham radio operators in the United States received pointed reminders from the FCC about rules against news organizations using their frequencies to conduct interviews.

Journalists began to flood the nearby island of Barbados in the hopes of gaining access or, at least, information from American military officials. By October 27, there were 369 journalists gathered in Bridgetown, Barbados waiting to get in to Grenada. To put this statistic in perspective, approximately the same number of reporters were accredited by Dwight Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters in May of 1944, just before the invasion of Normandy. The reasons for these larger numbers were that the operation was obviously not going to involve a long-term commitment, modern television requires crews of technicians as well as journalists, and because of Grenada's proximity to the United States it was a short trip for members of the press. Nevertheless, it became quite clear that the media shutout did not occur because of the overwhelming numbers of media personnel, but because the military simply did not want for them to be there to observe the operation.

Tensions mounted between journalists and U.S. authorities even in Barbados where the military was also extremely restrictive. The first thing ABC's Steve Shepard saw when he stepped off the plane on to Barbados was an American military official ordering two cameramen to stop video taping parked Air Force planes and military personnel walking around the runways and terminal. He commented, "Just moments after my arrival in Barbados it had already become clear that covering the Grenada invasion was not going to be easy." Similarly, another photographer had his film seized by a Navy commander merely for taking pictures of sleeping troops. Eventually, the U.S. authorities opened up a makeshift press center in the old airport terminal in Bridgetown. It was essentially just a "hot room with a few metal chairs," but they installed about 30 phones and perhaps as appeasement, were soon handing out free beer. Despite the beer, as Thomas E. Ricks of the Wall Street Journal observed, by "late Wednesday the press was plenty pissed off."

Back in the United States, the television networks employed lively electronic graphics, innumerable maps of the island, and were quickly using up all of their old file footage of Grenada to make up for the lack of real information. The networks made no effort to hide their anger from the American public. When, on the first day of the invasion, the Pentagon finally provided video tape of a Cuban arms cache, CBS aired it with a prominent label: "Cleared by Department of Defense Censors." In John Chancellor's commentary that evening, he complained that "the American government is doing what it wants to, without any representative of the American public watching what it is doing." And, in an October 27 radio news broadcast, Dan Rather sharply declared that "the Department of Defense today handed out the first photographs -- sad pitiful stuff from the Army, the kind of stuff the Russians usually hand out for public consumption."

The issue of press restriction and exclusion also created turmoil within the Reagan administration. White House Press Spokesman Larry Speakes was not informed about the invasion until right after it began. This caused problems when on October 24, CBS correspondent Bill Plante was tipped off about the impending military operation. He immediately went to Speakes for confirmation. The Press Spokesman, who had heard nothing of this, checked the rumor with administration officials, came back in ten minutes and said, "Plante, no invasion of Grenada. Preposterous. Knock it down hard." The next day when Speakes found out that he had been lied to, and subsequently misled the press, he was furious and allegedly threatened to resign. He complained bitterly in a memo to senior White House aides that he could have kept the secret without telling an outright lie, and that "the credibility of the Reagan administration is at stake." Les Janka, the Deputy White House Press Secretary for Foreign Affairs did, in fact, turn in his resignation three days after the invasion saying, "Withholding and protecting sensitive information is something experienced press officers know how to do, but lying to the media, even unwittingly, is a cardinal sin against credibility... With my institutional authority undermined and my personal integrity under challenge, I saw no choice but to resign."

Finally, on Thursday, October 27, the first group of journalists landed on Grenada. These members of the networks, major news magazines, and three daily newspapers were taken on a "carefully guided group tour... no procedure had been set up for them to go very far; no troops or transport were available to get them around the island or to the units in action." They were allowed to stay on the island one day, and the next day a new pool replaced them. Though the media were finally being admitted to the island, these first small groups of reporters were essentially held captive by U.S. forces at Grantley Adams airport. ABC reporter Mark Scheerer described his experience:

Thomas Ricks, whose pool finally arrived in Grenada on Saturday, October 29, had similar experiences trying to get a story for his newspaper. Whenever he wandered away from the pool and asked soldiers questions, the response was invariably, "Can't talk about it."

For a long time after the invasion of Grenada, it was not clear exactly who in the Pentagon or the Reagan administration ordered the press shut out. According to Fred C. Ickle, Under Secretary of Foreign Policy for the Department of Defense, the decision to exclude the press was made by a "senior group involving State, Office of Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman's office, and then the recommendation was approved by the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman, and I believe, the Secretary of State. The President didn't make the decision." Peter Braestrup, in his research for the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Media and the Military, was much more specific in identifying who made this decision and where it was stated. "By all accounts, exclusion was the express wish of General John W. Vessey Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it was contained in the hastily drafted operations plan."

Regardless of who made the decision, all facets of American media were enraged by its implementation, and the Pentagon and the administration needed to issue explanations of the logic behind the restrictions. A variety of reasons were posited. Primarily, U.S. officials claimed that in the brief two day span they had to plan and assemble the Grenada operation, they simply had no time to work out the logistical details necessary to bring journalists. James D. Watkins, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations explained,

Along with this notion that the military had neither the time nor the logistical capability to allow journalists to observe the operation, officials also said that the media would jeopardize the surprise and security of the operation, and that their own safety would be in jeopardy. Eight hours after President Reagan announced the invasion, Defense Secretary Weinberger and Chairman Vessey officially stated that the press could not be admitted to Grenada because of the "necessity for complete secrecy to ensure the success of the surprise attack, and concerns over corespondents safety." Finally, the administration tried to distance itself from the order to exclude the press by claiming that the decision was a military one and not a political or civilian question. Weinberger several times made a major point of deferring to "'professional military judgement' with the official line being that it had been the uniformed military officers who had decided to curtail the activities of the press."

Besides the openly stated reasons given for the restrictions, there were also a number of underlying, unarticulated issues broiling just beneath the surface of the Grenada media-military conflict. Clearly, a feeling had developed within the military that "engaging the press while engaging the enemy is taking on one adversary too many." A Task Force Commander of Operation Urgent Fury, Admiral Joseph W. Metcalf admitted what was rarely said in official Pentagon statements: "I did not want the press around where I would start second guessing what I was doing relative to the press. I cannot duck the issue." Essentially, the press had come to be viewed as a hindrance and a detriment to a military operation.

As such, it was the memories of Vietnam and Watergate, the perception of unfair media biases, and the Reagan administration's attitudes on information control which were the true underlying reasons for the restrictive measures. In the eyes of the military, the press would view any foreign policy venture since Vietnam as wrong and bound to be a failure. And in the eyes of the administration, the media would assume that anything done in secret by the executive branch since Watergate was bound to be corrupt and dishonest. In addition to the shadow of Vietnam looming over the media-military relationship was the sense that, in general, the media was biased, un-objective, and overly liberal, and that "operations in a place like Grenada are condemned by word and nuance before anyone has had a chance to weigh them at any length." Echoing this feeling was Diana West's analysis of New York Times editorials on Grenada in which she concluded that the newspaper is "out of sync with those whose surrogate it would claim to be. Its paranoid, unrelenting skepticism of American policy has become a ludicrous spectacle, especially in the instance of Grenada in the light of the facts reported in its own front pages." Thus, while planning for Grenada, the White House and the Pentagon concluded that no matter what happened during the invasion, the press would not give them a fair shake.

But the other significant underlying reason for the press restrictions in Grenada was the Reagan administration's heavy emphasis on secrecy and information control. Throughout his first term, Reagan worked diligently but unsuccessfully to get Congress to approve legislation imposing life-long censorship of the work of government officials who handled sensitive material. Reagan also began the practice of subjecting federal employees to random lie detector tests ostensibly for the purpose of plugging leaks. Likewise, his administration was active in excluding foreign speakers deemed dangerous or subversive, discredited fairly innocuous foreign films as propaganda, and fought to limit the the Freedom of Information Act. The Reagan administration's attempts at complete control of the flow of information in Grenada was not an aberration. It was part of this larger pattern and reflective of a mind-set in the administration that "events can be shaped by shaping their presentation, [and] that truth should be a controlled substance." Though it was never stated as such, the press blackout in Grenada was a direct result of Reagan's concerns about secrecy and his desire to control information and appearances.

The press reacted quickly and angrily to the administration's reasons for their exclusion, and immediately offered arguments to refute the government's claims. Clearly, the most important issue for the military was to maintain the element of surprise, which, as Admiral McDonald said in his February 1984 Operation Urgent Fury Report, would be achieved if the press were "restricted until the initial objectives had been secured. The rescue of the hostages was completed on the second day and the island was then open to the press." [emphasis added] In fact, the only Americans held hostage during the invasion of Grenada were reporters held by the U.S. Navy. American forces were completely unaware that St. George's Medical College had two campuses, and it was not until 4:00 p.m. the second day of the invasion that students on the Grand Anse campus were discovered and flown back to the United States. Obviously, since the second group of students were not found by U.S. forces for over a day, the American students were remained safe not because of the operation's surprise, but simply because Grenadians and Cubans did not want to take them hostage. Likewise, that the operation was a surprise to anyone in the Caribbean seemed even less plausible as Radio Grenada had been broadcasting suspicions about an American invasion days before it happened. An angry reporter summed up the feelings of an October 26 press briefing with Larry Speakes: "The only people who were surprised by this were right in this room."

Journalists were not arguing that surprise and secrecy should not be part of a military operation, but that it was only necessary when pertaining to facts that the enemy did not already know. U.S. officials, however, concealed from the press such information as the numbers of Cuban personnel on Grenada, the types and amounts of Soviet weapons found at the airport, and the nature of the Russian documents found in the files of the Grenadian government. These were facts that the enemy certainly must already have known. Even if it were true that a press pool absolutely could not have been assembled to land with the troops because American hostages would have been taken, generally, the American press was left feeling that,

Along with the argument that surprise would have been jeopardized, members of the media also debated the notion that they would have been too much of a logistical burden for the Army to bear during the invasion. During the battle, the effort to keep the press away taxed the resources of the U.S. Navy perhaps as much as admitting them would have. The fact that the press was prepared to pay its own costs in getting to an island in the Caribbean damages the argument that they were demanding "material support and physical arrangements which the fighting soldiers and the tax payers could not afford to give."

Similarly, the press also bitterly refuted the claim that the Army simply could not afford to take responsibility for their personal safety on Grenada. When, in the press conference the day after the invasion, Larry Speakes reiterated the administration line that journalists were excluded for their own good, ABC reporter Sam Donaldson snapped venomously, "Don't tell me Ronald Reagan has our safety at heart." It is quite true that the press has never called on the government to guarantee their safety during war time, and that of the many journalists who have fallen in battle since the Civil War, no one has ever blamed the government or the military for not going out of their way to protect them. Perhaps Sam Donaldson and others were so embittered by the raising of the personal safety issue because of its double-edged nature. On the one hand, it was offered as an excuse, and on the other, it was offered "to try to induce the average American to distrust the press even more, on the inference that newspapermen normally need to be coddled, shielded, and protected, and that their judgement as Americans should be questioned because their manly heroism was in question." The personal safety issue also showed some insensitivity to the long history of sacrifice made by American war correspondents.

Finally, and most disturbing, there was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's willingness to allow the military to do whatever it wants during a time of emergency, and that he "wouldn't ever dream of overriding a commander's decision." For many in the media, however, it seemed quite clear that if some general does not understand the principles at stake by excluding the press, then it is the job of civilian commanders, the Secretary of Defense in particular, to remind him. As stated in a New York Times editorial on October 28, and echoed in papers across the nation, Weinberger's logic was a "perversion of the idea of civilian control of the military."

The media's angry sentiment did not at all match the mood of the American public which was vastly in favor of the military clamp-down on the press. According to an NBC poll, the press ban was supported by a five to one margin. Peter Jennings of ABC said that his mail was "99%" supportive of Reagan on the issue, and out of 225 letters received by Time magazine, eight of nine were against the press. Conservative pundits and members of Congress led the charge against the media. Journalist Pat Buchanan proclaimed, "If the people who exhibited such arrogant and infantile behavior were 'representatives of the American public' when exactly did we elect them -- and how do we go about canning them." In a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Floyd Spence (R-S. Carolina) likewise stated, "I think it is one of our finest hours. I think the military have really come through.... If you keep the press out of an operation that way, the chances of success are enhanced immeasurably.... Hurray for that success." As his colleague Rep. William L. Dickinson's (R-Alabama) comment illustrated, Americans were reacting against the press on quite a personal level: "I think it is ridiculous for the press to run this country, to run military operations, and to make military decisions or political decisions.... One of the nicest things, warmest glows I got out of the whole thing was to see Dan Rather squirming and squawking." The New York Times was also harshly criticized as "so mistrustful of the American government -- and later, so mistrustful of the instincts of ordinary Americans, that they failed to recognize simple facts that almost everyone else could see, and they had to take tortuous linguistic routes to bypass the conclusions that nearly everyone else had reached."

Others were simply amazed at the pent-up public hostility unleashed by the Grenada dispute. Max Frankel, Editorial Page Editor of the New York Times was bewildered by the criticism and "the quick, facile assumption by some of the public that the press wanted to get in, not to witness the invasion on behalf of the people, but to sabotage it." James R. Shepley, a former World War II correspondent and President of Time Warner aptly scored Grenada as a major setback for the American press. "The citizens," he said, "are underwhelmed by the bitching. I question that at any time since the communicators and their partners in outrage, the Congress, were almost taken prisoner by Confederate forces in the First Battle of Manassas, has the First Amendment been so much in trouble."

The Grenada media-military conflict illustrated that a major rift had developed that threatened to permanently separate the press from the public it was supposed to serve. The reasons were clear about what had caused the rift. When the 241 U.S. servicemen were killed in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut just days before the invasion of Grenada, a disgusted American public watched as the homes of the victims were surrounded by reporters and cameras looking to record the grief of their families. People questioned the taste and morality of a press corps that, once they were admitted to Grenada, displayed in a national news magazine a graphic photograph with an identifying subtitle of a young Marine helicopter pilot lying dead on the beach. How was this man's family supposed to feel? "Was the photograph a necessary exercise of the First Amendment, or an example of insensitive journalistic sensationalism with no respect for either the living or the dead?" A large number of Americans believed that the press was not at all interested in objective reporting. They viewed the media as a liberally biased institution, largely intent on finding or creating scandals, and "utterly detached from, and perhaps even hostile to, the government of their country." People simply did not like the attitude of the media. Comparing the journalists of Grenada to those he worked with during World War II, Shepley noted, "we did not approach every military option as a potential scandal -- another Watergate in the modern sense -- and if we had, we would have earned the same response from the American people that the media is not enjoying today."

Just as there were many who criticized the press for their biases and negativity, there were those who felt the public was simply punishing the national institution which had been the bearer of bad tidings throughout the chaos of the previous decade. During the years between the end of the Vietnam War and the invasion of Grenada, Americans had been starved of victories, and fed their fill of self-doubt and failure. Thus, by October 1983, the public was aggravated not because "the press at times may be too timid, or tied to the power structure, or unwilling to pursue vigorously issues that ought to be pursued. The worry was, and is, that reporters will operate to capacity and get the bad news into print. Government doesn't want that. Often, readers don't either." Likely, if the invasion failed, the American public would have jumped on the bandwagon in protest of the heavy-handed treatment of the press. As former Reagan aide, Michael Deaver, explained, the majority of Americans at that time were quite happy not knowing and not seeing everything. Deaver believed that the public supported Grenada because "they didn't have to watch American guys getting shot and killed. They'll accept strafing a Libyan ship or going down and having a 48 hour action in Grenada, but they couldn't stand night after night of armless children in Lebanon." In sum, the public's 'see-no-evil' attitude about the Grenada invasion and support of the press restrictions was a

One of the major roles of the press in combat is to assess the performance of the troops, their leaders, and the hardware which so much American tax money pays for. For procurement and prestige purposes, the military, like any bureaucracy, is naturally interested in under-reporting the failures and mishaps of their equipment and operations, and as such, can not be considered an objective evaluator of its own performance. Because the press was not present, the American public did not receive as good of an assessment of the military's performance as they could have. Operation Urgent Fury was not such a smoothly run mission. Mistakes were made that the American public and policy makers needed to know about.

Lieutenant Raymond Thomas noted that before his unit's October 27 attack on the Calivigny Barracks he was warned that there were "30 Russians and 400 Cubans... that it was almost a suicide mission." Like many of the Grenadian maps American forces used, the numbers given to Thomas were inaccurate, and may have been a cause of subsequent errors of the mission. At Calivigny, one Blackhawk helicopter came in too fast, landed too hard, and bounced into a ditch. The two behind it crashed when one spun out of control after its pilot was shot. The bulk of the unit's 28 casualties occurred in these crashes, yet Americans only heard about this because of a medical student broadcasting from a ham radio. There were other questions of military performance. As Americans learned much later, there was never "a single military commander on the island. There were Marine units and Army units, commanded separately. There [were] persistent reports that they came close to fighting with each other, having nobody else to fight with." Command and control of the invasion was extremely difficult because the operations were scattered, units were given inaccurate information, all four armed services were involved, and none of their communication systems were compatible. It is fortunate that the Cubans and Grenadians the U.S. encountered were either unwilling or unable to put up a tougher fight.

Many questions about Grenada still linger unanswered because of the exclusion of outside, unofficial observers. It has been alleged that the U.S tried to suppress the fact that the overwhelming majority of their opposition during the invasion came from Grenadian rather than Cuban forces. The Cubans claimed that of the 37 bodies sent back to them, 13 were Grenadian. American officials, however, say they killed only 3 Grenadian soldiers. There are also unanswered questions about the role of a Cuban ship that was anchored just outside of St. George's Harbor during the invasion, the difficulties experienced by elite U.S. commando forces, and whether the Cubans at the airport were soldiers, construction workers or both. Most importantly, serious policy issues were left un-investigated. If the purpose of the invasion was anything other than to rescue the American students at the medical school, then Ronald Reagan would have been officially violating the War Powers Act. Finally, there is simply the question of whether the American students were really ever in any danger before the invasion.

Questions like these, which possibly could have been answered had journalists been allowed in Grenada, also hurt the credibility of the Reagan administration and raised suspicions that the White House and the Pentagon had something to hide. Speculation and rumor naturally filled the media void which the restrictions had created. When several days after the invasion there was still scattered resistance around the island, but no one knew how much, how serious or by whom, "The result was a vague and nagging alarm, a suspicion that the world's largest military power had trouble subduing a flyspeck island." If the press and the public had been kept better informed, these anxieties could have been assuaged. According to Les Janka, the black-out was not just an unconstitutional act, but a politically stupid one since "the overall operation was a domestic political success, but the positive results were under-observed and ultimately tarnished by the controversy over media access."

Not surprisingly, plenty of lofty rhetoric was uttered as journalists carried the First Amendment as their banner and rode into battle against the U.S. military. On Nightline the second evening of Operation Urgent Fury, Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Howard Simons expressed his interpretation of the Constitution as, "It seems to me that the founding fathers invented the First Amendment to protect us against secret government. It also seems to me that every time there's been deception in this country we've paid a terrible price for it.... What distinguishes this country from other countries is the First Amendment, the people's right to know." Likewise after his resignation from the Office of White House Press Secretary, Les Janka wrote, "In the Grenada affair we lacked the will and foresight to rise above the immediacy of military security and to act in the spirit of the Constitution wherein our true national security lies." Despite these calls for the the media's "right of access" and the people's "right to know," neither of these liberties are ever directly mentioned in the Constitution. Access to government activity has always been a customary privilege, and a tacit agreement between the military and the media rather than a given Constitutional right. The military argued that there is nothing in the wording of the First Amendment that would "require that the U.S. armed forces always invite the press, or offer transportation, or otherwise facilitate the entry of reporters on to foreign battlefields." Yet, neither is there anything in the First Amendment permitting the military to arrest newspapermen and prevent them from sending their dispatches back to their offices.

Thus arose the sticky legal issue of press access and military restriction. By mid-November, groups were looking to challenge the constitutionality of the Grenada black-out. The first suit against the government was filed on October 26, it was, however, never taken very seriously as the leader of the suit was Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine. Jack Landau, Executive Director of the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press led another group in a law suit. Using Richmond Newspapers Inc. v. Virginia, a 1982 case in which the Supreme Court overturned a lesser court's decision to exclude reporters from a criminal trial, the Reporter's Committee conducted a survey of all U.S. military engagements from 1754-1983 including twenty-two Caribbean expeditions from 1880-1922. The conclusion of the study was that reporters could not legally be excluded from a war just as they could not from a criminal trial since both have traditionally been open to outside observers. It was important to note that the Committee distinguished between covert operations and conflicts involving large numbers of troops, for longer periods of time, which were expected to be observed by many people. The case would have been difficult to win as Richmond Newspapers actually only provided right of access to places "traditionally open to the public," which a battle field was not. Additionally, the case would have run up against Article II of the Constitution which grants the President authority over foreign and military affairs. The consensus of the attorneys working on the case was that the Supreme Court, as it was then constituted, would not have ruled in favor of the media, and that "Losing a lawsuit over Grenada would not only serve as a legal setback in the favorably evolving line of press access cases. A loss would also serve as a public rebuke of the fourth estate, whose growing claims to special treatment were viewed with mixed feelings by the public at large, judging by the polls."

By mid-December, the lawsuit was dropped in favor of working with a media-military relations panel to develop guidelines for future military actions. Winant Sidle, a former public affairs officer at the Pentagon, well-respected by both the military and the press, was selected as chairman. A critical point about the formation of the Sidle Panel was that the effort was not initiated by the President or the Secretary of Defense, but by General John W. Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Originally, journalists were supposed to be included on the panel along side members of the military. Members of the press, however, decided that it was inappropriate for them to serve on a government committee, so news organizations gained input via detailed questionnaires. The non-military members of the panel were made up of retired media personnel and prominent members of journalism schools.

The report of the Sidle Panel was released on August 23, 1984. Stating the principle that "it is essential that the U.S. news media cover U.S. military operations to the maximum degree possible consistent with mission security and safety of U.S. forces," the report made a number of specific suggestions to the Pentagon. The Sidle Panel believed that public affairs planning should be conducted concurrently with operational planning. It suggested that media guidelines be produced for every U.S. military action and that there be as few guidelines as possible. The Panel also wanted military planners to carefully consider the communications and logistical needs of the press; and to improve relations and understanding, media-military dialogues should be established throughout the year. Most significantly, the Sidle Panel suggested the implementation of a permanent, rotating press pool which would be ready and available to be called on at any time to fly with American troops to the site of a surprise operation. The pool was to consist of as many members as logistically possible, but at the very least, two wire service reporters and two photographers, a two person television technical crew and one reporter from each of the four networks, one news magazine reporter and a color photographer, and one daily newspaper reporter. Though the Sidle Panel's report concluded with the reminder that the "appropriate media role in relation to the government has been summarized aptly as being neither that of a lap dog nor an attack dog, but rather a watch dog," many in the press nevertheless felt as though the Sidle Panel was nothing more than a legitimization of heavy-handed military policy, and that they were being the lap dogs by accepting it. The Sidle Panel's suggestions were approved by the Pentagon, though it was not until five years later in Panama that the press pool system was truly tested for the first time.

In the invasion of Grenada, the American press was excluded from the military operation to an extent unprecedented in U.S. history. Despite the fact that the fourth estate -- that sacred institution of impartial observers and the public's personal check and balance on government -- had been blind-folded, Americans loved it. Seemingly, Grenada proved that the attitudes of the military, the government, and the people had all changed and left the press behind crying foul to themselves. Only a decade after Watergate and Vietnam, Americans had gone back to trusting the Pentagon more than the press.

The invasion of Grenada was a watershed event in the relationship between the media and the military. It unleashed the animosities of Vietnam that had been festering quietly for over ten years. It illustrated some of the problems that new forms of television-satellite technology, and small limited military operations would be presenting in the coming years. Grenada also widened and clearly presented the numerous rifts that had been developing between the media and the military, the public and the media, and the government and the public. After the invasion of Grenada it was apparent to the Pentagon and the press (though perhaps not to the Reagan administration) that changes were necessary, and a new relationship would inevitably rise out of the example of Grenada. The test in Panama would be to see if this new relationship was different in substance or just appearance.