Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  As the number of Pearl Harbor correspondents swelled to more than a hundred, and the chorus of criticism grew louder and more insistent, Drake’s “open door” policy was gradually curtailed, becoming a “door sometimes open” policy, and then a “door usually shut” policy. One of Drake’s more merciless critics was Bob Casey of the Chicago Daily News, who remarked: “The local publicity office should be handled by somebody of decent rank and considerable tact and experience, but most of all by somebody who can look at a clock and tell what time it is.”46

  In the early months of the war, especially, Nimitz could spare little time to think about public relations. He had much bigger problems on his hands. As commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas (CINCPOA), he held authority over all branches of the armed forces within his immense theater. Rivalries between the army, navy, and marines were a constant irritant, and it took all of Nimitz’s considerable diplomatic tact and leadership skills to soothe those chronic frictions. In this respect the war correspondents did him no favors, because it was in their nature to investigate controversy. They flitted and fluttered around it, like moths around a porch light. Mesmerized by the various internecine rivalries on Oahu, they did a heroic amount of firsthand reporting. They goaded the marines to complain about the navy, the army to belittle the marines, and the naval aviators to share their feelings about the surface warship officers. They lay in wait at the officers’ clubs, where liquor loosened men’s tongues, and asked questions shrewdly calculated to elicit frank responses. The censors did not let them publish a word on the subject, but their insights were soon transmitted back to the mainland by word of mouth, where they circulated freely in the newsrooms and the halls of power in Washington. Newspaper stories originating in the United States were not subject to redline censorship. Although bound by the voluntary code to refrain from publishing certain cold hard facts, the papers were free to publish opinions, and much of the press coverage and editorial commentary about the war was informed by the illicit pipeline of information flowing back from the war zones through the correspondents and their remorseless chatter.

  By the spring of 1942, in Washington and elsewhere, the post–Pearl Harbor mood of goodwill between the press and military was turning sour. Editorial pages charged that the army and navy were erring too much on the side of withholding information. Many of the officers who made day-to-day censorship decisions were relatively junior, both in age and rank, and anxious not to bring the wrath of superiors down on their heads. A twenty-five-year-old lieutenant would suffer no consequences for killing a story on dubious pretenses—but God help him if he passed a story, and a colonel or general subsequently read it and judged that it had harmed the cause. “The army and the navy felt they owned the news and behaved as if they owned it from the beginning of the war until the end,” said David Brinkley, then a cub reporter for a South Carolina paper. “They used it skillfully, as the civilian agencies of government had always used it throughout history—to try to conceal their failures and blunders and to give out fulsome detail on their successes.”47

  In reply to this rising chorus of criticism, FDR created a new agency to coordinate the release of war information across the entire federal government. An executive order of June 13, 1942, established the Office of War Information (OWI), “in recognition of the right of the American people and of all other peoples opposing the Axis aggressors to be truthfully informed.”48 He tapped a veteran newspaperman and radio broadcaster, Elmer Davis, to run it. Four existing federal agencies were merged into the OWI, and Davis said he felt like “a man who married a four-time widow and was trying to raise her children all by her previous husbands.”49 Knowing that he would encounter resistance from the War and Navy Departments, Davis asked that the OWI’s charter include authority to review all military operational reports from the war theaters, and to make independent determinations of what news could be released. “But the problem,” wrote Brinkley, “was that other agencies, particularly the army and navy, did not read Roosevelt’s announcement or, having read it, resolved to ignore it, and did.”50

  Neither the army nor the navy much liked the idea of answering to a new civilian propaganda agency. Asked whether the OWI would be directing the War Department’s press functions, Secretary Henry Stimson responded with a question of his own: “Is Mr. Davis an educated military officer?”51 Navy Secretary Frank Knox was himself a newsman—he had been part-owner and proprietor of the Chicago Daily News—but Davis later said that while Knox was always polite, “still all in all I got the polite brush-off.”52 At a daily morning conference in the OWI offices, army and navy officers presented a summary of the reports that had come in from the war theaters during the previous twenty-four hours. Davis and his colleagues then compared those reports to the official communiqués. If they judged that information had been improperly withheld, they pressured the military departments to release it. In extreme cases, as one of Davis’s subordinates put it, the OWI claimed the authority “to direct that this information be inserted into a communiqué unless the military could convince us that it had been omitted because of a valid reason of security.”53

  Davis could make little headway with Admiral King. He soon concluded that in the realm of public relations, the navy was the “problem child” among the military services. In a remark that circulated widely in Washington, Davis observed that King’s idea of a press policy was to tell the public nothing until the end of the war, and then to issue a two-word communiqué: “We won.” King treated Davis cordially, probably because he had been instructed to do so by the president, but remained only minimally cooperative throughout the summer of 1942. At best, during this period, King regarded publicity and press affairs as second- or third-tier problems that could be delegated down the ranks and then ignored.

  His attitude was confirmed and hardened by a potentially devastating leak that appeared in print the same week the OWI was created. On June 7, a day after the Battle of Midway, the Chicago Tribune ran a front-page story under the headline: “Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea.” The Tribune reported that the navy had learned critical details of the Midway operation “several days before the battle began.”54 The story was cagey about its sources, but a discerning reader could deduce that the Americans had broken Japanese radio codes. That was true, but it was also one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war, and disclosing it in a major American newspaper threatened to alert the enemy to the breach. King was livid and ordered an investigation that quickly concluded that the culprit was Stanley Johnston, a Tribune war correspondent who had been aboard the aircraft carrier Lexington when she had gone down on May 8 at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Picked up by an escorting destroyer, Johnston had berthed with a group of Lexington officers while they returned to the American mainland aboard a transport, the Barnett. While underway on the Barnett, Johnston saw a top-secret dispatch from Admiral Nimitz dated May 31, 1942, concerning details of the pending Midway operation. Commander Morton Seligman, the Lexington’s executive officer, was blamed for the leak.*

  The question of whether to bring treason and espionage charges against the Chicago Tribune dragged on until August, when it was feared that the ongoing imbroglio only increased the risk that the Japanese would notice it. The government convened a federal grand jury in Chicago, but the navy would not provide explicit testimony about its supersecret cryptanalysis programs, and the jury refused to return an indictment against the Tribune. The navy eventually concluded that the Japanese had not noticed the story, or had not recognized its significance—and in postwar interrogations, no evidence emerged to contradict that impression.55

  Pressure was building on Admiral King and the navy to be more forthcoming with bad news. On Capitol Hill, according to a Washington reporter, it was taken for granted that “the Navy is throwing a lot of curves in its communiqués. . . . That is to say, they are holding back a number of serious losses. The idea, it seems, is that Admiral King believes the people can’t take it.”56 On s
everal occasions in 1942, American ships had been sunk in combat, and the public had not been told until weeks or even months after the fact. In each case there were plausible reasons for withholding the news—either because the Japanese did not know the ships had sunk, or because time was needed to notify next of kin—but critics suspected that the news flow was being managed to minimize embarrassment and protect King.

  After the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, the first American newspaper stories had reported a smashing victory. The reports exaggerated Japanese losses—which in truth included only one small “baby flattop,” the Ryujo—but said nothing of the destruction of the Lexington, one of only four U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific at that time. King had personally ordered that her loss be concealed from the public, on the grounds that no Japanese airplanes had been in the vicinity when she went down, and therefore the enemy might not know she was gone. News of the sinking of the Lexington was held back for more than a month, and then released on June 12, when Americans were celebrating victory at the Battle of Midway. “Holding up this information gave to our Navy security,” the communiqué claimed, somewhat defensively, “which was a cornerstone in building for the Midway victory.”57

  Two months later, on the night of August 8—a day after the 1st Marine Division landed on Guadalcanal—four Allied cruisers went down at the Battle of Savo Island. King ordered that news of the awful defeat be strictly suppressed. His reasoning was sensible: the action had occurred at night, and the Japanese fleet had withdrawn immediately toward its base at Rabaul, so one could assume that the enemy did not know what losses they had inflicted. A navy communiqué released a week later emphasized American victories in ground and air combat. But there would be no further details on Allied naval losses “because of the obvious value of such information to the enemy.”58

  But the full dimensions of the disaster at Savo Island could not be kept from trickling back to the mainland through the rumor mill, and by early October—two months after the fact—it was an open secret throughout official Washington. Cynics assumed that King was mainly interested in protecting himself. The Guadalcanal operation had been his brainchild, and he had launched it over the objections of the commanders assigned to carry it out. According to New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin, King was “on the hot seat because he had been pressing for Guadalcanal right along. He had been the one who said go in, even on a shoestring, and those repercussions, those losses, this naval ineptitude, would not sit well with the American people and wouldn’t increase his fame or fortune.”59

  Elmer Davis urged King to tell the public about the losses at Savo Island, and also the sinking of the carrier Wasp by submarine attack in September. After a tête-à-tête in King’s office in early October, Davis told his wife that the meeting was “acrimonious yet somehow remained friendly.”60 The admiral seemed to realize that his position had become delicate. A media blackout immediately after the sinkings had been defensible, but there was little reason to keep the news out of the papers for a full two months, especially when hundreds of survivors had already returned to the States. In the absence of credible reports, dark rumors were flourishing. Some whispered that a large portion of the Pacific Fleet had been wiped out in the Solomons, and that the Japanese were on the verge of overrunning Guadalcanal. It was a political season—the 1942 midterm congressional elections would take place on November 3—and some suspected that Admiral King and the navy were covering up losses in order to protect FDR’s allies in Congress. Under mounting pressure, King conceded that it was time to come clean about the Savo Island debacle, and the navy released a communiqué on October 12: “Certain initial phases of the Solomon Islands campaign, not announced previously for military reasons, can now be reported.”61 The sad story of the four sunken cruisers was told in unsparing detail.

  The very next day brought a happy surprise. Another nighttime sea action had been fought in the same waters as the earlier battle, and this one—the Battle of Cape Esperance—had been a smashing American victory. The navy released another communiqué reporting results in full.62 The timing was genuinely coincidental, but newsmen and Republican congressmen angrily charged that the navy, as in the case of the Lexington announcement after Midway, had held back bad news (Savo Island) until it could be paired with good news (Cape Esperance). The episode coincided with the most desperate stage of the Guadalcanal campaign, when many doubted the navy and marines’ ability to hold the island, and mismanagement of war news had only exacerbated the tension in Washington. Congressman Melvin Maas, who had recently visited the South Pacific, rose on the floor of the House to declare that the Japanese were winning the war in the Solomons, and charged that the government was trying to cover it up. The press now treated the navy’s communiqués with skepticism and derision, and guessed at the magnitude of its yet-undisclosed losses.

  King could be pigheaded, but he was experienced enough in the ways of Washington to know that perception and reality often amounted to the same thing. He had many enemies who would like to be rid of him—in the army and navy, in the press, and in Congress—and they had apparently launched a whispering campaign against him. National unity around the war effort was a matter of life and death. He could not afford to become a lightning rod for politically charged criticism; if he did, he would have to go. The time had come for a tactical retreat. He took Davis’s advice to clear the accumulated backlog of unannounced sinkings.

  On October 26, the navy announced that the Wasp had been lost more than five weeks earlier by submarine attack east of Guadalcanal.63 Later the same day, it reported the first results of the carrier clash known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, admitting that a U.S. destroyer had been sunk and “one of our aircraft carriers was severely damaged.”64 That was true: the unnamed carrier was the Hornet. But the next day, when a subsequent cable reported that the Hornet had burned out of control and had had to be scuttled, King hesitated to release the news. The Japanese might not yet know that she was gone, and they might find that information useful. But Elmer Davis warned that if the news were held until after Election Day, Republicans would raise a howl. Davis insisted on releasing it immediately, and felt strongly enough to take his case directly to Secretary Knox and even the president. On the other hand, Admiral Nimitz was equally adamant that the news must be kept from the Japanese, and made his case in a firmly worded cable from Hawaii.

  Backed into this corner, with the OWI director threatening to resign over the issue, King decided he had no choice. On October 31, three days before the midterm election, a navy communiqué admitted that the Hornet “subsequently sank.”65 The next day Nimitz protested to King that the disclosure was “harmful to us in a very critical situation.”66

  One of King’s most trusted confidantes was his personal lawyer and friend Cornelius (“Nelie”) Bull, who always addressed the admiral as “Skipper.” Earlier in his career, Bull had been a newspaper reporter, and he still had many friends in the Washington press corps. Observing the growing controversy, Bull grew concerned that King’s head might be on the block, and he resolved to do something about it. One Friday evening that October, he ran into Glen Perry, assistant bureau chief of the New York Sun, at the crowded bar of the Press Club on Fourteenth Street. With their bellies pressed against the bar, the two men sipped Tom Collinses and cooked up a scheme. They would handpick a dozen experienced journalists who worked for major newspapers and wire associations, all with reputations for “absolute integrity and reliability.”67 They would invite them to meet King in a private, nonofficial setting, preferably on a weekend. The newsmen would agree to strict ground rules in advance, tantamount to a latter-day “deep background” briefing—they would agree not to print any of the information given by King, but only to use it to enhance their understanding of the navy’s public communiqués. They were not to quote the admiral, either by name or as an unnamed source; and they would not disclose to anyone outside their newsrooms that he had talked to them. Bull would host the
gathering at his own home, a place where King would feel comfortable and at ease. Beer and canapes would be served. The reporters would take no notes in the admiral’s presence. Bull and his wife would endeavor to provide a relaxed and familiar social setting, an environment that would remind no one (especially King) of an official press briefing.

  When Bull proposed the idea to King, the admiral surprised his lawyer by agreeing on the spot. He was aware that his opposite number in the army, General Marshall, had provided off-the-record briefings in his office at the War Department, and that no leaks had occurred as a result. Evidently it was true (as Bull, Knox, Davis, and others had told him) that reputable journalists could be trusted to abide by ground rules. By meeting at the Bull residence, King could pretend that the event was a social occasion, a convenient fiction that allowed him to circumvent the navy’s Office of Public Relations, which fell under Secretary Knox’s supervision.

  King’s black sedan pulled up in front of Nelie Bull’s house on Princess Street, in Alexandria, Virginia, at eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, November 1. It was a small house dating back to the Revolutionary War, directly across the street from an old whitewashed nineteenth-century jailhouse that had been a notorious prison for Confederate POWs. Leaving his driver and marine guard behind, King rang the doorbell. The reporters had already arrived and were seated in the living room. A “tall, spare figure in regulation Navy blues” entered and gave Bull his greatcoat and uniform hat. Glen Perry described the scene in a memorandum to his editor: