Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

His discoveries and the resulting book energized Quatro and Kimo McVay, especially the latter. Gregarious and larger than life, Kimo still lived in Hawaii and made his living as a promoter, exporting Hawaiian talent to the rest of America. His most famous client was Don Ho of “Tiny Bubbles” fame. The Olympic champion surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku was Kimo’s partner.

  In addition to his letter-writing campaigns, Kimo made a typically audacious move: He invited Mochitsura Hashimoto to Honolulu to meet with the survivors of the ship he sank. Hashimoto accepted. The meeting took place on December 7, 1990, Pearl Harbor Day. Honolulu papers ran with the story. Tears flowed at the Arizona Memorial that day, but also warmth and forgiveness and an understanding that all the men present, including Hashimoto, had only been acting in the service of their countries.

  Finally, Kimo enlisted the help of a wealthy retiree named Mike Monroney. A former Washington, D.C., lobbyist, Monroney still had close ties to Congress, not including the fact that Smith’s military liaison, John Luddy, was Monroney’s son-in-law.

  Monroney also had a personal reason for helping with the exoneration of McVay. He had just missed going on Indianapolis’s final, fatal cruise. As a young sailor assigned to the ship, he fell ill just before she sailed and his orders were changed. With this history, as well as Monroney’s twin ties to Congress, Kimo was counting on him to help drum up interest in the new exoneration effort on the Hill.

  After more than a year of research, Smith landed firmly on the side of the survivors. He decided to move forward and ask his fellow members for a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. These senators included John McCain of Arizona, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

  Their response was universal, nonpartisan, and almost identical to Senator Warner’s: Seriously? I get what you’re trying to do here, Bob, but this is a kid we’re talking about. Is this really worth activating the machinery of the U.S. Senate?

  For Smith, it was a good question, a challenging question, and he didn’t take it lightly. He’d had to come to terms with that himself. He wondered what his father would have thought of his quest. Smith himself held the Navy close to his heart. During his Vietnam tour, he served aboard ship. He had seen many brave pilots launch from aircraft carriers into the fiery maw of battle. Some of them didn’t make it back. All of that was part of Smith’s identity. He was known in the Senate as a conservative maverick, pushing “unpopular” causes, such as citizen gun rights and unborn children’s right to life. And yet he was also a great respecter of tradition. The quest to exonerate McVay created a conflict between the two: respect for the authority and traditions of the Navy, which had reviewed the case for decades and always reached the same conclusion, and a cause unpopular in Washington but precious to a bunch of old men and a kid.

  To secure an Armed Services Committee hearing for Hunter and the survivors, there was only one man he really needed to convince: Warner, the committee chair. But Warner, who had once served as Navy secretary, was opposed just like everyone else—just as another Navy secretary with an even more intimate connection to Indianapolis had been. USS Cecil J. Doyle skipper W. Graham Claytor, who had charged without orders to the sinking site to spearhead the rescue, served as Secretary of the Navy under President Jimmy Carter. He, too, had demurred on taking any action on the McVay affair.

  The sinking of Indianapolis was second only to Pearl Harbor as the Navy’s greatest loss in World War II, Warner reminded Smith. It had been litigated and relitigated, and the conclusion was always the same. And now some kid was going to swoop in a half-century later with new information that was supposed to change history? That simply didn’t make sense. Warner didn’t want to embarrass the Navy, and he didn’t want to embarrass the committee or himself.

  “John, look, if you can’t chair the hearing, I’ll chair it on your behalf,” Smith said. “But would you just agree to the hearing and listen to these men and this boy? I mean, if an eighth-grade kid can come in here and feel this strongly about it, and these veterans are all here standing up for their captain, we at least owe them the right to be heard.”

  “But the Navy’s already decided this,” Warner objected. “We’re going to stir up a hornet’s nest that doesn’t need to be stirred up. And I don’t want to give them the impression that we’re trying to overturn the court-martial.”

  “We’re not trying to overturn anything,” Smith said. “We’re going to listen. That’s all we’re going to do. Exoneration comes later, if you agree with it. If you don’t agree with it, we won’t do it.”

  3

  * * *

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1999

  Offices of the Navy Staff

  The Pentagon

  Washington, D.C.

  THEY HAD BEEN GOING at it for more than an hour, a dozen or so khakied Navy officers sitting around a conference table in a room on the fourth deck of the Pentagon’s E Ring. Notebooks were open, sheets of paper scattered around the table. Windows in the room opened to an inner void space between the building’s D and E Rings, but Bill Toti was wishing they overlooked something else—the Pentagon helipad, Arlington Cemetery—anything that might distract him from the agitating, round-in-circles arguments he was suffering through this morning.

  The lineup was eleven to one. So it was no surprise that the one—Toti—was losing.

  “No, no, no,” a Navy lawyer said to Toti. “You cannot say that!”

  The lawyer’s reference was to a single line in testimony Toti had written, to be delivered before the Senate Armed Services Committee in the matter of USS Indianapolis and Captain Charles McVay. After months of wrangling, Senator Bob Smith had finally secured his hearing. The committee had summoned witnesses to testify in support of—and against—exoneration, including the chief of naval operations. It had fallen to Admiral Don Pilling, Toti’s boss, to testify on the CNO’s behalf.

  In mid-July, when Pilling learned he was going to testify, he had called Toti into his office. “You know this story better than anybody on the Navy staff, so I want you to write my testimony,” Pilling said.

  Toti was astonished. Whether by serendipity or providence, it seemed his life intersected again and again with the cruiser Indianapolis. From the time he first saw Jaws at age eighteen and learned of the cruiser’s fate to his three tours aboard her namesake sub, to the survivors’ plea for help—all these factors were engineered by outside forces, none through any maneuvering of his own. Now, somehow, Toti found himself, a former Indianapolis captain, perfectly positioned to help restore the reputation of Indianapolis’s most famous captain. After all his history with that storied ship, her crew, and her captain, he now found himself aligned with the senior Navy officer designated to testify before Congress on matters Toti had studied his entire adult life. He thought, yet again: you can’t make this stuff up.

  Pilling knew Toti was a friend of the survivors. He knew Toti’s view of the court-martial. Toti had finally given the admiral a copy of the Proceedings article in which he concluded that although the court-martial might have been technically correct, it was nevertheless unjust. Pilling liked the piece and told Toti he thought the tone was “finely nuanced” and “about right.” Pilling told Toti it would be okay to write his testimony using the article as a foundation—testimony he would deliver to Senator John Warner and the Senate Armed Services Committee as the official position of the Navy.

  “This is yours,” Pilling said the day he gave Toti the assignment. “Make it right.”

  Incredible. Toti had had to work to keep his mouth from falling open. Pilling was one of the smartest men Toti knew, someone with a strong sense of justice. The planets were aligned so perfectly, how could it not go right this time?

  He jumped into the job, putting in twelve to fifteen hours a day. There were others at work, too, some seeking McVay’s complete exoneration in the legal sense, something for which there was no provision of law. McVay’s son, Ki
mo, young Hunter Scott, and many survivors fell into this camp. Meanwhile, another camp—mostly representing the Navy—wanted nothing changed at all. They believed that any modification to McVay’s record would constitute a rewriting of history. Both sides would fight hard to win—or at least not to lose.

  In the end, Toti produced what he thought was a third option—not declaring the court-martial of McVay wrong per se, but suggesting that in retrospect the court-martial was unjust for many reasons having to do with the presentation of evidence, and that the trial generated no lessons learned or remediation that could prevent similar future disasters. Therefore the court-martial served no purpose, and with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, should not have been pursued.

  Toti’s proposal carefully avoided indicting the Navy with words like “scapegoat” or “cover-up” as had so much literature in the past. It was a compromise Toti thought the Navy could live with, a way the Navy could restore McVay and honor the survivors while still saving face. He submitted the testimony to Pilling, who read it and declared the tone, again, “about right.”

  But the lawyer now in the room with Toti didn’t think it was about right at all. In fact, he didn’t think it was even in the same neighborhood as right.

  The meeting in progress was a prep session for the hearing, which was scheduled for Tuesday, September 14, just five days away. Present were this JAG lawyer, who was a captain, and two more Navy lawyers of lower rank, all sitting across from Toti at the large conference table. There was also a commander from the office of legislative affairs, or “OLA,” and two PAOs, public affairs officers.

  The session, which involved the linear dissection of the testimony Toti had written for Pilling, was supposed to last an hour. Now, well into hour two, the PAOs were fairly placid, the OLA somewhat less so. The JAG captain, however, was nearly apoplectic.

  The line of testimony riling the lawyer was this:

  We cannot change history, but with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, we can say that the court-martial of Captain McVay likely did not have the intended effect for the Navy, and were we to do it today, we would probably do it differently.

  “If Admiral Pilling says this, it will open the Navy to litigation risk,” the captain was saying.

  “From who?” Toti shot back, incredulous.

  “The descendants of the lost at sea!”

  Inwardly, Toti rolled his eyes. Did the JAG really believe in this paper tiger? Or was he intentionally exaggerating the litigation threat to preserve the status quo on McVay? Toti thought maybe it was time to dial back the temperature in the room a bit.

  “Look,” he said, “my dad was a lawyer my entire young life, and now he serves as a judge. My whole upbringing, I was surrounded by the law. I don’t hate lawyers. Quite the contrary—I understand why you do what you do. But I have to tell you your argument just doesn’t make sense.”

  One of the PAOs cut in and changed the subject. “Commander Toti, what do you think will be the reaction of the people in the hearing room to Admiral Pilling’s testimony?”

  It was public affairs’ job to anticipate backlash and either head it off or be prepared to manage it. Many survivors and their families would attend the hearing, represented by young Hunter Scott, who would also testify. Several survivors would testify in their own right, along with the author Dan Kurzman. Admiral Pilling would appear for the Navy, along with Dr. William S. Dudley, director of naval history, and Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, Judge Advocate General of the Navy.

  “I can’t give you a guarantee, but I’m pretty sure that if he gives this testimony, there will be shouts of glee,” Toti said. “The survivors’ reaction will be something like, ‘Finally!’ This is a chance for them to see that the Navy is willing to say, ‘We’re human, and we’re willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, in this case we made a mistake.’ ”

  The JAG made a noise of condescension, and Toti fixed him with a glare. “Do you even understand why the survivors are so agitated about this? For fifty years, they feel the Navy has just made things up.”

  He reminded the lawyer about the latest legal analysis by another JAG lawyer, Commander R. D. Scott, which included intimations that McVay lied about how he got off the ship. “You guys are supposed to stick to the law,” Toti said to the JAG. “Tell me, on what tenet of the law was that opinion based?”

  Another lawyer spoke up. “It’s not the law, per se. He was making an argument. If it can be shown that a witness has shaded the truth in small ways, a jury can sometimes be persuaded that the witness isn’t telling the truth in larger ways.”

  “Well, it was a stupid thing to include,” Toti said. “I think it just adds weight to the survivors’ opinions that the Navy is still grasping for evidence that McVay was somehow at fault, fifty-plus years after the fact.”

  No one in the room disagreed, but the JAG captain eyed Toti across the table. “Commander Scott doesn’t think you’re a very good lawyer.”

  Toti sighed. “And between the two of us, I’m the only one who actually commanded a ship.” Turning to the PAOs, he said, “Look, I’m not trying to convince the lawyers. This is the court of public opinion. Lawyers don’t have a monopoly on the truth.”

  After two hours, the meeting broke with the lawyers no closer to approving Pilling’s testimony. The next day, Friday, the group was to reconvene, this time with the admiral in attendance. Overnight, Toti made some modifications to Pilling’s statement, adding a few things, softening others.

  • • •

  By the start of Friday’s session, Toti and the lawyers had come to agreement on almost everything. They entered the office of the vice chief of naval operations, with its long mahogany conference table near the entrance door. Pilling took his place at the head of the table, with Admiral Hutson and the JAGs to his right and Toti immediately to his left.

  The group conferred on the expected flow of the hearings, concluding with a review for the admiral of the one remaining point of disagreement:

  We cannot change history, but with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, we can say that the court-martial of Captain McVay likely did not have the intended effect for the Navy, and were we to do it today, we would probably do it differently.

  The JAG captain reprised his argument from the day before. Toti reprised his. Pilling listened. Then, Admiral Hutson, who would also be testifying at the hearing, weighed in. He supported his JAG officers’ position, he told Pilling.

  Well, that’s it, Toti thought. I’m dead in the water. But he kept his face impassive, put his elbows on the table, and folded his hands under his chin. There was a long silence as Pilling gazed down at the written testimony and considered all that had been said. Then he raised his head and fixed his blue eyes on Admiral Hutson.

  “I’m perfectly comfortable with making this statement,” he said.

  Toti had to raise his fingers to cover his mouth in order to shield a wide grin. The Navy was finally going to say what everyone has been thinking for fifty years! Even beyond winning the point, he was happy to see things work the way they were supposed to work: The lawyers were supposed to give advice and assess risk, but then the line officers were supposed to factor in a holistic, operational perspective. And it happened just that way—the process at its finest.

  After giving the JAGs a moment to recover, Pilling wanted to know what questions he should anticipate from the senators. Toti had prepared for the worst-case scenario. He knew all the arguments cold and did not want his boss to be caught flat-footed. So he had drafted a series of “murder board” questions—the kind of questions used to practice for a moot court or cross-examination. Questions that usually turn out be more difficult to answer than those that actually materialize.

  Toti had titled the list “List of questions that could be asked that we don’t have answers to.” There were about ten of them, and the group around the conference table tossed them back and forth with Pilling.

  For example: As former chairman of the
intelligence committee of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, wouldn’t McVay have been aware of the ULTRA program? And if so, wouldn’t he have known that people like Commodore Carter had ULTRA access? And that if Carter said there was nothing to worry about, wouldn’t it have been reasonable for McVay to conclude that there was, in fact, nothing to worry about? Would that not explain why McVay told Commodore Van Metre during the supplemental investigation, “The knowledge which I possessed indicated to me that there was little possibility of surface, air, or sub-surface attack; in fact, no possibility.”

  Another murder-board question: The Navy’s latest legal analysis suggested that McVay should have gone down with this ship. Is that the Navy’s policy—that captains should go down with their ships? If not, how did that statement make it into an official Navy report?

  There was also this: Combat intelligence intercepted Hashimoto’s report that he had sunk an enemy ship, but the Navy did absolutely nothing to follow up on that report. That failure resulted in nearly twice the loss of life as the charge McVay was convicted of, hazarding his vessel. What operational commander was held accountable for those deaths? Or doesn’t accountability apply to admirals?

  Finally, there was the question Toti had asked in his Proceedings article: If McVay was not court-martialed for losing his ship, but for hazarding it by failing to zigzag, would he have been court-martialed if he had sailed a straight course and reached Leyte safely?

  The lawyers suggested possible responses, which were actually platitudes and not answers. Soon the hour grew late and the workweek was done. The admiral gathered his things, including his “night reading book,” a massive binder he took home each evening. It was filled with briefing items that covered the vice chief’s vast range of responsibilities. This night, Toti tucked in a fat packet of materials related to Indianapolis, including the murder-board questions. Pilling would review it all over the weekend.

  The hearing was now four days away. With Pilling in the survivors’ corner, Toti felt that for the first time in more than half a century, their quest to win justice for their captain had a good shot at success.