Off the Shelf: CAQ's Books of Interest, page 64

Who Killed George Polk: The Press Covers Up A  Death in the Family
by Elias Vlanton with Zak Mettger
Temple University Press, 1996,
Endnotes, Bibliography, Index,
322 PP., $27.95 HB.
 

Nearly five decades have passed since a Greek fisherman pulled the body of CBS Middle East correspondent George Polk out of Salonika Bay.  Polk had been bound and blindfolded, shot in the back of the head, and dumped, still alive, into the water. Because of his reporting on corruption and human rights abuses in the Greek government's civil war against communist partisans, the regime and its right-wing allies were the prime suspects in his murder.

Over the years, various authors have challenged the official version and offered alternate theories about who really murdered George Polk and why.  The cast of suspects includes the Greek right wing, the CIA, British intelligence, and Greek or US profiteers.  At first glance, yet another book on the Polk Affair appears gratuitous, but Greek-American writer and researcher Elias Vlanton has produced the definitive study.  Relying on extensive research in the State Department archives, contemporary press reports, interviews, and other archival materials, Vlanton demolishes the official story.  He also tells the tale of a craven US press establishment that kowtowed to US foreign policy imperatives instead of pursuing the truth.

In 1948, the birth of the Cold War, Greece was the frontline of the US anti-communist crusade.  Communist guerillas who had fought the Nazis during World War II now battled right-wing Greek Royalists for the country's future.  President Truman, determined to foil "communist expansionism," announced the Truman Doctrine, and the US began pouring millions of dollars into Greece.  Vlanton shows how the administration counted on the press to play
a vital role in manufacturing support for its new, interventionist policy.

He also shows how the press largely complied.  Along the way, Vlanton illuminates the unseemly relationship between the press and the US government.  Although some of Polk's comrades in the Newspaper Guild attempted to initiate an independent investigation, moves by establishment luminaries led by Walter Lippmann undercut their effort.  Instead, the Lippmann Committee (whose general counsel was Col. Bill Donovan, former head of the CIA's predecessor, the OSS) agreed to monitor the Greek investigation.  With State Department and other records, Vlanton exposes the close collaboration between the US Embassy in Athens and the Lippmann Committee.

Vlanton does not cry conspiracy, nor does he claim US involvement in Polk's death.  What he does argue, quite convincingly, is that the US government and the establishment press shared fundamental assumptions about the Cold War and the critical importance of the Greek anticommunist struggle.  For both, solving Polk's murder was less important than resolving it.  Similarly, the Greek regime used the Polk Affair to advance on two fronts:  It pleased and appeased its sponsor, and scored a propaganda victory against its communist foes.  What both the Greeks and the Americans wanted was to quickly dispose of this looming scandal; justice for George Polk came in a distant second.

Vlanton and coauthor Zak Mettger provide a minute-by-minute account of Polk's peregrinatons before his death, the Greek government's investigation, the lone trial in the case, and the flurry of US diplomatic activity designed to keep the lid on.  They do so with panache; the book reads as much like a thriller as a historical investigation.  They also evaluate earlier theories of Polk's murder (and find them wanting) and present their own, based on documents uncovered during Vlanton's research.

Every year, the US journalistic community presents the George Polk award for "the best in American journalism" (last year's winner was Alan Nairn).  But, as Vlanton makes achingly clear, "the best in American journalism" did much less than their best when it came to uncovering Polk's killers.