Aggressive and confident of his own visionary ideas, Kent Cooper inaugurated the Associated Press's twentieth-century transformation from a stodgy, lean, domestic wire service to a brighter news, feature, and photo service on the international stage. A frequent critic of government news suppression and propaganda, Cooper is credited with introducing the phrase "the right to know" to the journalist's lexicon, the phrase meaning that the citizen is entitled to have access to news as a necessary condition for political freedom. As AP's chief administrative officer for a quarter of a century, Cooper diplomatically guided the news service during some of the organization's most crucial challenges: the modernizing of the news report, the news cooperative's internal conflicts over members voting and franchise rights and service to radio stations, the breakup of the international news cartel, a court battle over AP's monopoly practices, and the beginnings of a post-World War II...