by Lynn Vincent
• • •
On Saturday morning, September 11, Toti was at home with Karen and the kids. The college football season was in week three and Navy was playing Kent State. Toti had his living room television tuned to ESPN for the pregame. Outside, the morning had shrugged off a cool start and was climbing toward the low eighties under crisp blue skies. It was shaping up to be a gorgeous day.
With the hearing on McVay’s court-martial three days away, Toti felt he had done all he could do. He’d spoken with the survivors, who knew about Admiral Pilling’s testimony and were hopeful. Paul Murphy would be the survivors’ de facto spokesman. Toti had helped him prepare his testimony. Senator Bob Smith, meanwhile, had been working closely with Hunter Scott, and with Kimo McVay’s friend, Mike Monroney, the former D.C. lobbyist. In the run-up to the hearing, Monroney hosted a cocktail party and invited key members of both houses of Congress to meet the survivors. Handshakes, photographs, martinis—the Beltway recipe for goodwill.
Toti’s phone rang, a corded landline on an end table next to the sofa. Keeping his eyes on ESPN, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Bill?”
“Yes?”
“This is Admiral Pilling.”
If life were a sitcom, Toti would have pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it in disbelief. The odds against the admiral calling him at home were astronomical, and on a Saturday even higher. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. Instinctively, Toti stood.
“I’m going to have to change my testimony,” the admiral said.
Toti’s voice was cautious. “What aspect?”
“Pretty much all of it.”
Toti’s heart sank. He sat back down.
“I’m going to have to stick to the party line,” Pilling said.
“Why?”
At this point, some senior officers would have groused about the way of things—politics, turf wars, dusty sacred cows. Pilling was not that type of man.
“I just wanted you to know,” he said.
But Toti knew his boss was being pressured. Even a four-star has people to answer to. Toti gazed out his family room window at the sky, the leaves just tipping toward autumn. Pilling had always said he wanted him to shoot straight.
“Respectfully, sir, this isn’t going to go down well with the survivors,” Toti said. “They’re going to be at that hearing, listening to you say the same thing the Navy has always said. It’s going to get ugly.”
Toti pictured Paul Murphy and Dick Thelen especially. Those two would fire back, both barrels. For them, five nights in the water outranked four stars.
“I think you’re right about that,” Pilling said.
There was a second problem. As the CNO’s office always did when preparing to speak before Congress, Toti had already sent the testimony to senate staffers. Both Warner’s and Smith’s people had already read it, and thought the approach gentle, nuanced, and the right one for the Navy to take.
“Now we’re going to go back to two senators and tell them, never mind, the Navy is going back to Plan A,” Toti warned. “I don’t think that will go down well either.”
Especially, he thought, since Warner never wanted this hearing in the first place. The senator had feared exactly this scenario, embarrassing the committee by dragging the Navy through the same old mud, but this time at the behest of a teenager.
Again, Pilling agreed. “But my hands are tied. That’s what we’re going to have to do.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Toti hung up the phone.
He knew Pilling was right: That’s what they were going to have to do. The question was, should Toti do more than that? Pilling’s phone call was so uncharacteristic, so far out of left field, as to be bizarre. Was there an unspoken message there, something for Toti to read between the lines?
The hearing was three days away. The survivors might not ever get this close again. Toti thought over his options for the better part of the afternoon, watching Navy beat Kent State. Then he picked up the phone and called Mike Monroney.
4
* * *
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1999
Senate Committee on Armed Services
Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.
WHEN SHE WALKED INTO the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room on Tuesday, September 14, the first thing Mary Lou Murphy noticed was the prevalence of gleaming wood paneling that covered the walls. Its rich, dark tones lent the chamber a decorous aura, suggesting that business of consequence was conducted here. The second thing Mary Lou noticed was all the security. Uniformed Capitol Police guardeded all the entrances and exits. She could only imagine what security precautions might be like for a really high-visibility hearing.
But she quickly got over being impressed. Over the weekend, Commander Toti had called her husband, Paul, with the bad news about Admiral Pilling. The Navy would be sticking to its guns after all.
Aides and staffers streamed into the room, along with survivors, family, and supporters. Eleven survivors had paid their own way to be here, and assembled reporters scribbled notes about their appearance. They wore blue jackets bearing an image of Indy on the back. Beneath the ship was a row of ten stars, one for each of her World War II battles. Some wore their blue USS Indianapolis ball caps, brims covered with gold braid.
Mary Lou saw a film crew at the back of the room, their cameras stamped “C-SPAN.” She was standing near one of the witness tables up front with Paul and Hunter Scott, the boy who’d set this whole thing in motion. The three turned to see Toti enter the room, trailing a tall, patrician man with white hair, blue eyes, and the gilded stripes of a four-star admiral on his sleeve.
Paul Murphy caught sight of Pilling, too, and eyeballed the admiral all the way from the door to a witness table where a nameplate marked his spot.
Toti dropped off the admiral’s briefcase and came over. Murphy wrapped him in a cheerful bear hug. “Good morning, Bill! Good to see you. What the hell’s wrong with your boss?”
Toti smiled and shook his head. “I haven’t had time to figure that out yet. He’s a really smart guy, and I don’t know why things are happening the way they are.”
“Well, it’s going to get ugly in here today. I hope none of it splashes on you.”
Toti hoped so, too, but not in the way Murphy meant.
After the surprise Saturday morning phone call from Pilling and a day of deliberation, Toti sat with Karen in their kitchen and talked through the situation over dinner.
“Why did he call me at home?” Toti wondered aloud. “Was he trying to tell me something without telling me something? Without spelling it out?”
“Maybe he just wanted you to know,” Karen offered.
“If that was the case, he could have waited until Monday. He’s not accountable to me.”
“He knows how hard you’ve worked on this. He knows how much the survivors mean to you.”
Karen was right about that. That’s why Toti had had to telephone Paul Murphy and tell him about the admiral’s reversal. Toti talked it over with Monroney before making that call.
“I can’t let Paul walk into the hearing room and get walloped with such a nasty surprise,” Toti told Monroney over the phone.
“That’s true. What are you going to tell him?”
“I’m going to tell him that I failed. That I tried to make it right, but that in the end, I failed.”
Toti had next called Murphy, who was hopping mad and vowed to tell all the other survivors of this perfidy. Then, as Toti hung up with Murphy, the seed of an idea began to take root.
There were those questions he had prepared for Admiral Pilling, the “worst-case scenario” questions. Monroney had seen them.
Toti let the idea marinate for twenty-four hours, then called Monroney again. “Remember those murder board questions?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, there are really no good answers for those questions. Even the JAGs couldn’t come up with a
ny, and I think they tend to prove the survivors’ case. Could you get them directly to Smith, not to one of his staffers?”
“Absolutely.”
It was important that Toti keep his fingerprints off the questions. If Smith used them in the hearing and anyone asked Toti where the senator got them, Toti would certainly own up. But it would be better for everyone if no one noticed remarkable similarities between the questions Toti had batted around with Pilling and the JAGs, and any that Smith asked Pilling during the hearing.
“Should we send them to Senator Warner, too?” Toti asked.
“You know, Warner’s got a temper,” Monroney said. “If he thinks Pilling is going to say one thing and he says another, he might get pretty angry.”
“Would that be good or bad?”
“That depends on whether you’re in Senator Warner’s firing line.”
Now, in the hearing room, Toti looked up as Senators Smith and Warner, along with Max Cleland, of Georgia, and Olympia Snowe, of Maine, entered the room. There was a general shush and shuffle as witnesses and spectators settled into their places.
Unlike many present, Warner was the survivors’ contemporary. He had enlisted in the Navy in January 1945, right out of high school, and left the following year as a third class petty officer. He then joined the Marine Corps, serving during the Korean War. Since then, the senator had made an art of marrying well—or at least conspicuously—first wedding Catherine Conover Mellon, the banking heiress, and then Elizabeth Taylor.
Warner walked first to the witness tables and then through the gallery and greeted each survivor. He then returned to the front of the room and took a seat at the center of a raised semicircular bench studded with microphones. As he looked out over the room, Warner’s face appeared chiseled from stone, his eyes hawklike under dark, low-set brows. The senator gave off the air of a man not to be trifled with.
He brought the hearing to order, praising the courage of the men who were aboard Indy “that fateful night,” and particularly those present in the hearing room. “It was a very moving experience for me to go back and shake their hands,” Warner said.
When Indianapolis sank, he had just completed recruit training at Great Lakes Naval Station and was in radio technician school in Chicago, the senator told the room. “In my generation, seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old sailors were training to come and join you at what appeared to be, at that time, an inevitable invasion of Japan. In the wake of the tremendous losses of ships and men in the Okinawa campaign, that was a sobering future for my generation, but we looked forward, in many respects, to coming out and joining those that had gone before us and fought in the heroic battles of the Pacific.”
Warner continued. “Today, we will share a chapter of that history. I think it is very important that we do so, as a reminder to this generation of Americans, living today in peace and tranquility and prosperity, that that prosperity and peace was earned through the sacrifices of so many men and women in World War II.”
The senator then smiled and turned his attention to Hunter Scott. “This is my twenty-first year in this senate,” he said. “I have been in many, many hearings but I think you are the youngest witness that I ever encountered. I hope, irrespective of how this concludes, that you will consider a career in the Congress of the United States someday in the future. I think you have got the makings of a darned good senator.”
Hunter beamed. “Thank you,” he said.
Warner then introduced Murphy, Harlan Twible, and author Dan Kurzman.
“Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that the committee has received a number of written statements from survivors who will not be testifying here today.”
There were twenty-two of those statements, including entreaties from Buck Gibson, who held a dying teenager on a floater net; John Spinelli, who floated for five nights and four days on a raft with Captain McVay; Donald Mack, the bugler who was on the bridge with McVay when Hashimoto’s torpedoes hit; Kenley Lanter, who was in the raft group with Glenn Morgan; and Frank Centazzo, who heard McVay shouting to all in earshot to abandon ship and later held the dying Commander Lipski in his arms.
According to the statement of Harold Eck, a former seaman second class, he had prayed daily for over fifty years that the injustice done to McVay would be corrected, removing “the blood of the lost lives” that was placed upon his hands. Dorothy Josey Owen also submitted a statement. Owen’s whole family blamed McVay for the loss of her brother, Clifford, but changed their minds after books presenting other facts came to light. L. D. Cox’s statement averred that he did not know of a single survivor who wouldn’t have been proud to serve under McVay again, and Cleatus Lebow’s statement said, “It is not right for one man to bear all the blame for the mistakes of so many others.”
All these statements would be entered in the day’s record.
Warner smiled down from the bench. “Now, Mr. Murphy, if you would be kind enough to do the old-fashioned drill . . . stand and be accounted for, gentlemen.”
Dr. Giles McCoy rose. “I was a PFC in the Marine Corps aboard the Indianapolis. We had thirty-nine Marines aboard, and we did security.”
“As you sound off, gentlemen, remember the old days,” Warner said amiably into the mic. “A little louder with your voice.”
James Belcher stood and claimed his hometown: Waynesboro, Virginia. “On board ship, I was a radioman striker.”
Next, Woodie James stood up. “I was a coxswain, First Division, gun captain on the center barrel. I boarded in October of 1943, and stayed there . . . until the excitement.”
At James’s wry understatement, chuckles rippled through the room. One by one, the men stood, elderly now but lacking no fire. Bob McGuiggan, a gunner’s mate striker on the five-inch gun, then a cannonball gunner. Mike Kuryla, fire control. Paul McGinnis, signalman. Jack Miner, radio technician. Richard Paroubek, yeoman.
Warner then asked Murphy to invite the survivors to sit down front, and Murphy did.
Smith spoke up. “I believe that Mr. McVay’s son is also here. Could we introduce him?”
Murphy looked to the back of the room. “Charles McVay IV, where are you?”
“Mr. McVay,” Smith said, “if you would come down in the front, that would be great.”
Quatro made his way forward, and when he passed through the bar, Toti read his face. Quatro’s eyes did not transmit awe at being summoned to the head of a great chamber before an august body. Instead, they contained a veiled skepticism. Not ungracious, just realistic. It was the face of a man who had endured a half-century of disappointment.
5
* * *
WARNER CALLED THE FIRST witness, Hunter Scott. Though an athlete and already five-foot-nine, Hunter had the likably lanky look of a teenage boy who has not yet grown into his hands and feet.
Hunter introduced himself to the committee members and told them how he became involved in the effort to exonerate McVay. He then held up a memento he’d brought. “With me, I carry one of my most precious possessions. This is Captain McVay’s dog tag from when he was a cadet at the Naval Academy. As you can see, it has his thumbprint on the back. I carry this . . . in memory of a man who ended his own life in 1968. I carry this dog tag to remind me that only in the United States can one person make a difference, no matter what their age.”
Hunter was in the middle of quoting Thomas Jefferson when, at the bench, Warner covered his microphone, leaned to his right, and whispered to Smith, “Good God, Bob, how old is this kid?”
“Fourteen,” Smith said. “Can you believe it?”
Hunter concluded his testimony by noting that since he began his quest in 1996, twenty survivors had passed away, leaving only 134 still living. “Please restore the honor of their ship while some of those men are still alive to see the dream become a reality.”
Warner gazed down at the boy. “That completes your testimony, Mr. Scott. Well delivered.”
The next witness was Paul Murphy. Still sitting behind Ad
miral Pilling, Toti could see Murphy in profile on the other side of the aisle separating the Navy witnesses from the ones for McVay. White-haired and usually ready with a smile, Murphy’s face was deadly serious. He looked down through his glasses and began to read his statement.
Murphy pointed out that the survivors in attendance represented about 10 percent of those still living. “But I can tell you that their presence here today speaks for all of the 316 who lived through those dreadful days. Two Ohio survivors who had planned to drive here today were Bernard Bateman and Albert Morris. I am sad to tell you that Bernard Bateman died last Friday. Morris is going to stay there and attend his funeral today. Now we have 134 who are left. We have lost seven or eight survivors since January. Our time is almost up.”
Murphy then laid out a bullet-point list of reasons the survivors believed the sinking of Indianapolis was beyond McVay’s control.
“Mr. Chairman, the loss of the Indianapolis remains the greatest sea disaster in the history of the United States Navy. This was an embarrassment to the Navy because they never even noticed we were missing until survivors were spotted, quite by accident, four days later. So they made our skipper take the blame to avoid admitting mistakes which were not his.”
Murphy was sidling up to the “scapegoat” argument, Toti noticed.
“My twenty-page written statement is devoted, in part, to commenting on and challenging recent Navy reports; specifically, one published in June of 1996, which attempts to defend Captain McVay’s court-martial and conviction. These reports greatly angered those of us who read them. They contained falsehoods, statements taken out of context, and plain mean-spirited innuendos about our skipper and others who have attempted to defend him. . . . The Navy report contained personal attacks on Captain McVay’s character. They were unwarranted, and in most instances, unrelated to the charges against him. On behalf of the men who served on the Indianapolis under Captain McVay, I would like to state our deep resentment and ask: Why is the Navy still out to falsely persecute and defame him?”
