the Soviet Victory Day). The formal cessation of hostilities was at 23:01 hours on May 8. Aftermath Kennedy would later write that he had respected previous embargoes because they were related to military security, but that the embargo of the surrender news was simply political. Kennedy himself had witnessed Soviet General Ivan Susloparov sign the instruments of surrender in Reims. He concluded, correctly, that the Soviets were insisting on a formal signing ceremony in Berlin for what amounted to propaganda reasons, and the Allies had agreed to wait until that took place to appease Stalin. (It would later emerge that Susloparov had asked Moscow for instructions about signing, but did not receive a response before the first ceremony; when the Soviet command did reply, Susloparov was ordered not to sign.) But the final straw for Kennedy was that SHAEF had permitted the captive German military command to publicly broadcast their notice of surrender to their own forces the day before; at that point, Kennedy decided, SHAEF had in effect announced the surrender. He wrote: "since Supreme Headquarters had released the news through the Germans, I felt under no further obligation to observe the gag." Opinion on Kennedy's action was divided; some of his own colleagues, at least partly because they had been scooped, insisted that he be deaccredited. Supporters pointed to the freedom of the press, but the AP eventually apologized. SHAEF disaccredited Kennedy and the AP returned him to New York. Initially Kennedy was kept on the payroll but given no work to do, eventually being fired in November. The following summer, the military acknowledged that SHAEF had not simply permitted the German broadcast, but ordered it, and that it had been made almost two hours before Kennedy's dispatch. Kennedy's story was accurate, but he had violated the military's strict embargo. Both the military and other reporters were angry with him. Two days after The New York Times ran his story as the lead item, the Times wrote an editorial saying Kennedy had committed a "grave disservice to the newspaper profession." According to Time, the incident gave the press a black eye and "strengthened the censor's hand". In 1948, in the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Kennedy published a personal essay about the embargo event explaining his side of the story. The essay was titled, "I'd Do It Again". In it he wrote: "The mass of Americans took