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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

some bad, and any photographs that the government took they had to give to everybody. Of course, we wanted to have our own photographs, and we also did have better photographers by and large than the government had. Not that some of those government photographers weren't very good.

Q:

Can you remember specific examples of how war censorship operated? Anything come to mind that you remember vis a vis Life?

Heiskell:

[pause] I'm forgetting the obvious clear-cut cases, although they existed, namely, they kept photographers out of certain areas. But there were a number of things that one knew and that one avoided. For instance, Paxton, who was the art director and I, for reasons which I cannot quite remember, knew that train loads of cement were going in the direction of what turned out to be Almagordo. We knew something very, very big was going on there and we were sort of curious to find out more about it, and at the same time we were aware of the extreme security measures that were being taken and when you become that aware of those security measures you tend to back away.

Q:

Let's go to an allied area which is not censorship but we'll call it political pressure from Washington. I'll give you two examples that I've run across from the war period and see if you have any memory of it. One, in other words, reaction after something has appeared. Do you remember a story called “Detroit is Dynamite” that, I think, was criticizing the war effort in Detroit, and there was a





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