Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his photography, is now 74 and confined to a wheel chair. He nearly lost his life in Vietnam – the place that made his reputation as one of the great defining journalists of the war. He’d gone back there two years ago to be part of a gathering of Vietnam-era journalists and to help train young Vietnamese photojournalists.

He and Tim Page, another legendary Vietnam War photographer, along with other photojournalists including Gary Knight, have established an Indochina Media Memorial Foundation and raised money and donated their time and shared their expertise. But Faas suffered a blood clot in the spine while there and is lucky to be alive.

Old friends and competitive rivals of Horst Faas need not worry that he’s lost any of his wit, cantankerous behaviour, and trenchant, often controversial views about photojournalism and the world of media.

Faas is scathing about the Pentagon’s restrictions on shooting pictures of dead or wounded American soldiers in Iraq. He notes that the iconic pictures of American soldiers in Vietnam could never have been taken if the Pentagon had imposed the same rules demanding signatures and approvals.

Nor could he have co-edited with Page one of the finest and most moving books on photojournalism – Requiem. None of his or Page’s photographs is displayed. Instead every photograph published in Requiem was taken by a photojournalist who was killed in Vietnam, including pictures rarely or never seen that were taken by fallen Viet Cong or North Vietnamese photographers.

Faas isn’t a knee-jerk critic of the military; indeed, Faas to this day defends much of the censorship that he endured in Vietnam. “We had it from day one,” he says. He also practised what he called acceptable self-censorship that saw him putting down his camera rather than taking pictures of the blown-up bodies and severed limbs of American soldiers.

But he said that many soldiers were “grateful for the drastic pictures” taken of them in combat because they showed “the reality, their fears, their pain, and their frustrations.”

Rumsfeld’s manipulation of the press (leaking against his own benefactors as often as he concealed facts from media and Congress) and his masters, however, seemed to immunise him from scrutiny. Cockburn’s fascinating study of a man that even Richard Nixon called “a ruthless little bastard” provides one of the best histories of Washington in-fighting from the Nixon to the Bush years.

It is the tale of a mediocre intellect and social climber from Chicago, who pushed himself forward to unelected office and launched his country into a war whose consequences he had little concern for. Cockburn demolishes the notion that Vice-president Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld were united. Cheney had come to Washington originally as Rumsfeld’s gofer, but ended up his superior.

Their rivalry helped push forward the invasion of Iraq, as the Vice-president’s office and Rumsfeld loyalists in the Pentagon outbid one another to make the case for war and to control its operation. The friendship had already faltered when Rumsfeld demanded his former acolyte’s support for his 1988 presidential bid and Cheney instead backed George Bush, Sr. Bush Sr. already disliked Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld wrote a letter asking the newly elected Bush for a job, the president-elect wrote in the margin, “NO! THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN!”

“It finally happened, when Bush’s son – who distrusted most of his father’s brain trust – took office in 2001.

Rumsfeld brought to the Pentagon many like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle who supported Israel’s most extreme policies, excessive military spending and egregious interference in the Third World. It’s a terrible tale, well told.

Verso Books £17.99

The subsequent efforts by the Pentagon to belittle or even deny the facts led to the removal of two general officers from command and then the Secretary of the Army himself suddenly had people asking if maybe the press “found its backbone again?”

Were things about to change after years of standing by uncritically recording dubious government propaganda that led the country into a war of choice and a president who assumed wartime executive power that could last indefinitely?

Obviously it’s too early to tell in this time of infectious uncertainty in the mainstream press that its economic model will keep it afloat.

Whether an aggressive press like that of the 1960s returns depends on a number of factors, the most important is regaining the public trust in the press as the mediator of information between the government and the people.

In this regard it has been standing on spongy ground for the past five years as it failed to aggressively challenge the Bush administration. Part of the reason for that failure was due to changing economic conditions. Years of declining circulation and dwindling stock prices caused even the largest newspapers to reduce staff and eliminate beats.

Developing an online capacity required shifting resources to 24/7 production. The result was fewer people to develop sources and dig out closely held information. Meanwhile a president muscled into office despite losing the popular vote with only minority support among the public was preparing to assert authority to fundamentally change public policy.

Unremarked by the press or the public President Bush was quietly adding to majority control of Congress a control of the bureaucracy of government unseen since World War II.Before the year was out career government workers in positions four, five, and often six layers deep in departmental bureaucracy had been replaced with political appointees of tested loyalty.

By the time of the attacks of 9/11, he had coupled majority support in the judicial and legislative branches of government to exert iron fisted and meticulous management of the flow of information to the public.

Strict discipline held public disputes at a minimum and dried up leaks the Washington press has come to depend on to challenge government assertions or questions plans and actions.
The first glimmers that an adversarial press might yet be rekindled was a spark struck in the summer of 2005 when Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer of the San Diego Union exposed the corruption of a local congressman by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and tied the corruption to leading Republican Congressional leaders.

Other reporters began to find similar sources outside Washington control and were able to document facts that opened administration policy decisions, including decisions related to the “war on terror,” to public scrutiny and questioning.

Then in August, 2005, Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans and the administration. Helpless, devastated families and anguished first responders, some of whom in this case were journalists, were in control of the flow of information. What they showed the world was a government unable, unprepared, perhaps even uninterested in responding to the catastrophe.

Events seemed to be setting the stage for the reappearance of the tradition of public interest journalism. It was at a time similar to these at the beginning of the 20th century that reporters like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffans first introduced the concept of investigative reporting and careful documentation.

Their investigations helped end an age of corruption ushering in the progressive movement in politics and journalism. When the press became enablers of the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, reporters like Wallace Turner in Oregon and Nathan Caldwell in Nashville and George Bliss in Chicago resurrected the watchdog role that had fallen into disuse during the years of the Great Depression and World War II and compelled the stewards of the Pulitzer Prize, the country’s highest journalism award, to establish a new category called “Investigative Journalism.”

Critics and analysts in the U.S. usually describe the place of the public affairs press as seated on a three legged stool. This metaphor assumes things work best when the three legs of the stool the government, the press and the public are in equal balance. The events of 9/11 destroyed this balance when it sent the president’s public support into the 60 percent range. Public opinion surveys now indicate that showing as they do a president standing at 39 percent.

An emboldened opposition in Congress is talking of plans to rollback the emergency legislation gives us another straw in the wind. The early start to the 2008 presidential campaign in which up to two dozens candidates seem likely to open a whole range of new and unexpected new channels of debate and discussion, new sources for reporters to probe and develop.

Finally, both parties are seeking to redefine themselves in a way that should put all that has happened since 9/11 on the table for post mortem. The US watchdog press might finally find its bark again.