Is the U.S. preparing a new Gulf of Tonkin
"incident?"
"You furnish the pictures and I’ll
furnish the war," is what newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst told
his frustrated photographer Fredric Remington, who had wired him from Cuba in
1898 that he could not find the war that he had been sent to cover. Hearst was
an advocate of U.S. expansionism. He had wanted the war against Spain in 1898 so
that the U.S. could grab Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from the then
failing Spanish empire. The purpose of sending a photographer was to publish
heart-rending pictures of Cubans suffering under the boot of Spanish domination.
Hearst was not a friend of Cuban freedom. He was an advocate of U.S. colonial
expansion.
