Pete Williams

About the Author: Pete Williams is the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

Generals, it's been said, are always preparing for the previous war. In Operation Desert Storm, the same might be true of journalists.

The press arrangements for the gulf war were not, as some journalists claim, the most restrictive ever in combat. Some limitations were necessary to accommodate a huge press corps and one of history's fastest moving military operations. Even so, reporters did get out with the troops, and the press gave the American people the best war coverage they ever had.

What public, in what other conflict, can possibly have had as much information as the American people in this war? People responded to that coverage. A Newsweek poll found...