by James Webb
Willoughby leaned forward, his unsolicited comments confirming my apprehension. “You have been disrespectful to the supreme commander in the past, Colonel Genius. I would advise you to watch the tone of your remarks.”
Genius now alternated his seemingly amazed stare among the four of us, as if trying to make sense of the sudden hostility. “I haven’t been disrespectful, sir. I’m a lawyer. It’s my duty to bring the bad news.”
“You’re a lawyer and also a military officer, Colonel,” said Whitney. “Just as I am.”
“I’m a member of the bar. I have certain obligations.”
Whitney guffawed. “Then maybe you’d be better off if you went back to Queens and prosecuted pimps.” MacArthur’s chief political adviser now looked up from his chair to the supreme commander, as if he were a retriever dropping a shot quail at the feet of his master.
“Court,” said MacArthur with false empathy, “you’re being too harsh. Proceed, Colonel Genius.”
Genius now stared fiercely at the supreme commander. He had crossed the line, and he was not going to back down. “Look, I’ve followed your orders and continued to accumulate evidence. No matter what you’ve said to anyone, we should charge Prince Asaka. I’ve documented beyond doubt that he was indeed in command for the rape of Nanking. I’ve placed him inside the walls of the city from Christmas Day 1937 through February tenth, 1938, which were the inclusive dates of all the mass atrocities! When he left, they stopped! Can you understand the implications of that?”
“You already told us that,” grunted an unimpressed Willoughby.
Genius flipped quickly through a manila folder and pulled out a worn press clipping. “Here. This is an interview from the New York Times, datelined Shanghai, December twenty-ninth, 1937. Hallett Abend is talking with General Matsui, who just returned from Nanking. Matsui, according to Abend, is a ‘likable and even pathetic old man.’ Matsui tells the Times he’s worried that Prince Asaka’s conduct in Nanking is going to ‘affect the imperial reputation.’ Now, why do you suppose he said that?”
“Well, and I suppose it did,” said an obviously unimpressed Court Whitney with a shrug.
Genius looked at Whitney as if he wanted to spit on him. He pulled another paper from his folder. “This is a message from Matsui to Prince Asaka’s chief of staff, dated January eleventh, 1938. He’s warning that the ‘unlawful acts should cease, since Prince Asaka is our commander, and military discipline and morale must be more strictly maintained.’ Do you understand what that means? Matsui says in writing that the prince is the commander, and he admits that unlawful acts are being carried out! How much more specific do you want me to get?”
MacArthur shook his head negatively, puffing on his pipe. “And what would happen if we charged Prince Asaka?”
“Well, for starters he’d be hanged by a rope until he’s dead,” said Sam Genius. “And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
“That’s not what I mean,” said MacArthur.
“Well, I guess it isn’t. So why don’t you help me out? What do you mean, General MacArthur?”
There, I thought, almost closing my eyes to avoid the impact that I knew was about to occur. They got him. Or who knows? Maybe he just got them. Genius had tiptoed over the very edge of insubordination, a precipice where Douglas MacArthur had himself lived for more than forty years, but one where members of his staff seldom lasted beyond a few seconds. And this time I knew that, whatever his motivation, Genius would not survive.
MacArthur froze the frumpy colonel with a warning glare, then suddenly waved at him as if he had become irrelevant.
“You can go, Colonel.”
“Sir?” Genius seemed stunned, his soft eyes suddenly repentant. But it was too late. MacArthur had just sent another veteran home.
“I thank you for your recommendations, and we will keep them in mind. You can go.”
“Go where, sir?”
“I said you’re dismissed.”
Genius sighed, as if finally understanding, and fiddled with his papers as he prepared to leave. He stood with his back to the supreme commander as he folded together the easel that held his flip charts. Unlike the others, I could see his face as he slowly worked the legs of the easel. Genius was stifling a grin. But there was something else, or perhaps a lot more, that he wanted to say before he made his final exit from MacArthur’s staff. And finally he said it.
“You’re a coward if you don’t charge this man, General.”
MacArthur’s eyes bored into the colonel’s back. No one had ever said such a thing in his presence, probably in his entire life, and certainly in all the time I had been on his staff. “No one calls me a coward! Turn around when you speak like that.”
Genius turned slowly, trying to stand tall as he faced MacArthur. His very demeanor was so rumpled and un-soldierly, and his status so minuscule in the presence of this five-star giant, that the confrontation seemed both improbable and comical. But still Genius persisted.
“What are you afraid of, General MacArthur? With your Medal of Honor and your five stars? What are you afraid of?”
General Court Whitney jumped in, pointing a warning finger at the colonel as he spoke. “Colonel Genius, we’ve tolerated your insubordination for the last time. I know how emotionally involved you’ve become with these cases, but it is beyond the realm of military propriety for you to speak in that manner to General MacArthur.”
“Calm down, Court.” MacArthur had stopped pacing. From his perspective, the ambush was complete. A second round of warning shots had even been fired, telling Genius that if he were to complain to the media, he would be exposed as a disrespectful and overly emotional lawyer who became too obsessed with his cases. “Colonel Genius, I thank you for your valuable service, and I can assure you that we’ll find a suitable assignment for you back in the United States.”
“Just like that?” Genius seemed infuriated.
“One more word and we’ll find you a jail cell in Fort Leavenworth.” Willoughby’s flat, accented tones gave his statement a clear promise.
“No, you won’t,” said Genius. He now grinned openly and defiantly, as if he had indeed snared them. “The last thing you want is for the press to start writing about a lawyer who’s being tried by a court-martial for telling you that the emperor’s uncle is a mass murderer.”
“Who said we’d give you a trial?” warned Willoughby.
“That’s just it. You’re not going to,” answered Genius. He was standing at the door with both arms full, prepared to depart but yet refusing to leave. He turned again to MacArthur. “I want Fort Ord.”
“Fort Ord?” said MacArthur.
“San Francisco’s lovely this time of year.”
MacArthur looked over at Court Whitney. “Arrange for Colonel Genius to report to Fort Ord.”
Whitney nodded, making a note in his legal pad. Colonel Genius gave all of us one last look, then dropped his thick manila folders onto the table in front of the couch. “I won’t be needing these anymore. And I assume you’d confiscate them, anyway.”
“That’s very good of you, Sam,” said MacArthur, as if no harsh words had been exchanged in the past ten minutes. “In fact, I did want those. And good luck at Fort Ord.”
“I have a favorite bar right off the bay in North Beach. You won’t want to be there when I toast you. Good day, sir,” said Sam Genius. And with the slamming of the door, he was gone from MacArthur’s staff.
The ambush was complete, from both sides. Sam Genius had his freedom, and he had also ceased to exist. I felt oddly sad, as if a part of my own past had faded out of the door with him. And I knew that Prince Asaka would never be charged. Indeed, in all the long months of trials that eventually took place, Asaka was never even called as a witness.
Court Whitney casually picked up the manila folders, placing them underneath his legal pad. They would no doubt disappear as well, with the sudden completeness of Sam Genius. He spoke calmly to me. “You’re a witness to this insubordinat
ion, Captain.”
General Whitney’s pointed reminder was clearly a warning shot of a different kind: I was either in the room with the giants or out of it on my own, heading back to—where? Los Angeles? I had no idea where MacArthur might send me, or how he might be able to avenge my future, even in Manila. A part of me wanted to stand up and defend Colonel Genius, to argue that he was right, even to follow him out the door. But follow him—where? To do—what? I was a futile, tiny piece of this grand puzzle, lucky even to be observing it.
I swallowed hard, shaken by the calculated abruptness of what I had just witnessed. “Yes, sir.”
“I want you to let Kido know about this exchange, so that he might inform the emperor.”
“Yes, sir. I’m having dinner with him tomorrow night.”
“Tell him today,” interrupted MacArthur. “The emperor needs to know, so that he can understand the other things we’re doing.”
I swallowed hard. “Yes, sir. I’ll call on him tonight.”
“Don’t tell him everything,” warned Court Whitney. “Just let him know that the supreme commander intervened to keep Prince Asaka from being charged as a war criminal.”
“Yes, sir,” I said quickly. My body was tingling with an eerie fear, as if I had become a Mafia messenger. “I’ll say exactly that.”
“So,” said MacArthur, turning to Willoughby, his chief of intelligence. “What’s going on with Prince Nashimoto?”
“He is the perfect hostage. If Colonel Genius were to”—Willoughby paused a moment, looking carefully at me—“to, accuse us of being soft on the imperial family, the detention of Prince Nashimoto would be clear evidence that he is overly emotional and wrong in his judgment.”
“This will scare the emperor?” MacArthur coaxed.
“It will scare the emperor,” confirmed Willoughby. “A very powerful signal, General.”
“Are there charges to be made against him?”
“Of course not, sir.” Willoughby again looked carefully at me, yet another warning. “We can point out that in 1937 he did travel to China and after that conferred with Prime Minister Tojo regarding the conduct of the war. That will justify our detention. But he is clean. And he was never even near Nanking.”
“Then arrest him,” commanded MacArthur.
“We can do that today,” shrugged Willoughby. “He’ll be in Sugamo Prison by this evening.”
And finally I knew that Sam Genius had been correct.
MacArthur needed a hostage, but above all the hostage had to be releasable once the emperor yielded to MacArthur’s demands to change the constitution. Bringing charges against Prince Asaka would almost certainly result in a conviction. In addition, the testimony adduced at trial would create a road map that led directly to the Grand Imperial Headquarters, which had been built in the palace as the Nanking operation began. The emperor had personally followed the campaign from this headquarters, even participating in many of its day-to-day decisions. Would that make him a war criminal? The Chinese and the Australians believed so, and Sam Genius had agreed. And that was too close for MacArthur.
So sending the cheerful, rotund old Nashimoto to a cell in Sugamo Prison for a few months would be a bold stroke by MacArthur, because it also held out a silent promise. By holding Nashimoto hostage to the approval of his new constitution, MacArthur was on the one hand asserting his power and on the other assuring the emperor that he would not allow a court to scrutinize the acts of Higashikuni and Asaka. The emperor’s position was secure, and MacArthur would do nothing to threaten it, including placing it in jeopardy by charging his uncles for the rape of Nanking.
Puffing on his pipe, MacArthur looked out the window for a long moment, toward the palace grounds. Just behind the Inner Palace, in a little clearing in the palace forest next to the Fukiage Gardens, was the holy of holies, the imperial family shrine. It was at this spot that Hirohito, nearly twenty years before, had stepped away from a retinue of two princes of the blood and two mere noblemen and undergone the sacred, private ritual that had made him emperor. He had placed his hands around the brocade bag that contained the green, tear-shaped jewels that represented the verdant islands of Japan. He had formally hefted a replica of the ancient sword of power, which the first emperor, the son of the Sun Goddess, was reputed to have pulled, Excalibur-like, from the tail of a dragon. And most solemnly, he had peered into an exact replica of the bronze mirror of knowledge, through which he reputedly was able to see the face of the Sun Goddess herself and thus be anointed with her wisdom.
The original of this bronze mirror, now more than two thousand years old, still lay in a vault at the Ise Shrine, on a faraway peninsula east of Osaka. The sacred shrine, to which every cabinet minister was required to report before assuming his governmental duties, overlooked the spot where the first emperor, Jimmu, had landed after crossing from a pirate’s enclave called Karak at the tip of the Korean peninsula and founded the kingdom of Yamato. By sunset, the chief priest of this shrine, the protector of the mirror of knowledge, would be scrubbing toilet bowls in Sugamo Prison.
Yes, I thought, of course the emperor would eventually make a deal. For what were MacArthur’s precious changes to him but words on a piece of paper, foreign scratchings that skipped like irritating little water bugs along the surface of the Japanese ethos?
“How much time will this buy us?” asked MacArthur.
Willoughby and Whitney frowned at each other, as if silently calculating the parameters of this shrewd and daring ploy. Finally Court Whitney answered. “It really depends on the emperor, Boss. There’s no way he’ll react immediately, because it would be too obvious that he’s folding on the changes in the constitution just to get his uncle out of jail. And my bet is that the imperial family will actually gain a lot of sympathy among the masses with Nashimoto in jail for a while. But on the other hand, the longer he’s in jail, the more pressure there’ll be on us from the outside to bring formal charges. So I’d say we’ve got a few months, unless the emperor acts more quickly.”
“And then where are we?”
“Well,” mused the sly and calculating Whitney, “if things work out—and I think they will—you’ll have your changes to the constitution, the emperor will have his favorite uncle back at the shrine at Ise, and our former allies will be screaming their heads off because it will seem you’re again too soft on the issue of war crimes.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” demurred MacArthur.
He moved away from the window, turning to me with a voracious look that told me I had other work to do. “Where are we with the Yamashita trial, Jay? When will it be over?”
“Over, sir?” I shrugged helplessly. “It’s scheduled to begin this week, although the defense lawyers are asking for more time. My message traffic indicates that the prosecution is getting ready to bring several new charges against General Yamashita. There’s no way they’ll be able to examine the charges in time to start the trial.”
“Poppycock,” said MacArthur. “We know the dynamics of this case. Anyone who drove through the rubble of Manila knows what happened.”
He began pacing again. His pipe had gone out. Now he held it in one hand like a pointer as he spoke in rapid bursts to Court Whitney. “Get Captain Marsh back down there. Have him deliver a personal, written message from me to the chief of my military commission—what is that major general’s name, the fellow who just reported in from Chicago?”
“Reynolds,” answered Court Whitney.
“Right,” said MacArthur. “General Reynolds. The logistician. He knows what he has to do. He’s taking far too long with this. We need more speed.”
He turned to me. “Are you understanding me, Jay? More speed!”
CHAPTER 20
Major General Russell B. Reynolds, the highest-ranking officer among the five generals appointed to the Philippines War Crimes Commission, had been given the official title of president. The plump, stern-faced career officer was the commission’s spokesman, respons
ible for its frequent public announcements and its relations with reporters who were descending upon Manila from all over the world to cover the Yamashita trial. He was also its designated “law member,” which meant that he would be ruling on questions of evidence, legal procedure, and technical matters during the trial itself.
It is not an exaggeration to say that General Reynolds was owned by Douglas MacArthur, from the very moment he accepted his orders to preside over the commission. He made no attempt to hide this obeisance when I arrived at his office on the morning before the trial began. In my thick and sweaty palm was the letter that Court Whitney had drafted on behalf of the supreme commander. As instructed, I bypassed his secretary and his aides and walked directly into the general’s office, where I delivered the letter into his own hands.
It was a simple letter, carefully worded. General MacArthur pointed out that he was disturbed by reports that the trial date might be continued due to the additional charges that had been filed. He stated bluntly that he doubted that the defense counsel really needed more time to prepare his case. And finally, the supreme commander wrote that the trial’s preparation had already taken too long. He ended by urging “more haste.”
“More haste.” General Reynolds nodded comfortably, reading the end of the letter aloud, then nodded again as he looked back up to me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell General MacArthur it’s all taken care of,” he said perfunctorily.
“Is that—it, sir?”
Something inside me wanted him to signal that he knew MacArthur was being ridiculous. In Europe and in Japan, the more properly constituted war crimes tribunals would not be ready to try cases for almost a year. Did it not seem peculiar to the severe, professorial Reynolds that the supreme commander was pressing him to proceed ever faster, less than two months after the formal surrender that ended the war? Did he not want to throw up his hands in exasperation and tell me of the impossibility of doing his duty without adequate preparation? Couldn’t he have attacked me, lowly subaltern that I was, venting his emotions and looking for a small measure of sympathy, knowing he was presiding, cuckoldlike, over a fraudulent endeavor?
