David Martin and Mary Walsh with an Emmy awarded for a bit on the Battle of Wanat in Afghanistan.
“Not every official was glad to see me but dealing with them face to face, day in and day out, developed a level of trust on both sides. Sometimes relationships got tense but never acrimonious,” Martin wrote. “Even when [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] Colin Powell was yelling at me to get the hell out of his way, I knew I could go back and talk to him the next day.”
“Nobody knew it at the time, but that was the start of the age of terror,” Martin mentioned.
“The next 40 years included the invasion of Grenada, Panama, the First Gulf War, the air war against Serbia, 9/11, the invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Bin Laden raid and the withdrawal from Afghanistan — not to mention all the cultural issues, like women in combat. I cannot imagine covering any of those stories without a building pass,” Martin wrote.
“I came to work for CBS in 1969, and it was shortly after that, they just sent me out to the Pentagon because I was the rookie,” Schieffer mentioned in a cellphone interview.
Schieffer was there for about six years and “loved it.”
“I’ll tell you what I loved about it — it was like covering a small town in the middle of a big city,” Schieffer mentioned. “You could get information, and you know, most of the time, it was information that not only helped you, it helped the public understand.”
“They spend a lot of money at the Pentagon and rightly so, but I think people have a right to know about it, and not just get one public relations person who’s going to put out a press release.”
Charlie D’Agata reviews from the Pentagon.
But it surely’s not simply the correspondents on digital camera who’re giving up their passes.
Cami McCormick interviews members of the Military.
CBS Information tales from the Pentagon through the years:
