Photographs of heroes

“Managing the news” is the elusive dream of all bureaucrats, and only a bureaucrat would attempt it. “News” cannot be managed, as wise men learned a long time ago. A fact is persistent and cannot be forever stuffed away in a closet.

Bureaucrats at the Pentagon, no doubt at the behest of the White House, imagine they can hide the evidence that Americans are dying in Iraq by restricting photographs of coffins bearing the bodies of heroes. Why they should attempt this is beyond us. The official reason is that the government wants to protect the “privacy” of the families, and that photographs of anonymous coffins, covered by the flag, will further wound the feelings of families. We’re surprised that someone at the Pentagon couldn’t come up with better spin than this.

The Bush administration is not the first to imagine that it could avoid criticism by keeping inconvenient facts away from public notice. This policy was inherited from a previous administration. But trying to hide the painful but necessary reality that Americans are dying in Iraq does no favor for the cause. President Bush frequently reminds us that we are at war, and the American people understand that war is deadly business. If the sight of a hero’s coffin is bad politics in an election year — which we emphatically doubt — well, we are all called to sacrifice in a time of war.

The ultimate sacrifice of American heroes should be honored, not hidden away, and there is no more eloquent way to honor it than by the solemn display of a military coffin bearing the body of a hero under the flag of a grateful nation. We have rarely published a more profound tribute to heroes than the photograph, of a lone soldier saluting rows of coffins of American warriors aboard the plane bearing them home, on our front page on Friday.

Molly Morel, the mother of Marine Capt. Brent Morel of Bartlett, Tenn., killed in Iraq on April 7, said it all. “I don’t want to see bodies coming home, either,” she told her hometown newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “But it comforted me to know they were treated with the honor they deserve. The American people have short memories, and I don’t want my son to be an obituary on the back page. My son died for America.”