JOE FOSS

“Those of us who lived have to represent those who didn’t make it.”

NO ONE would ever accuse Joe Foss of slowing down. Even now, at the age of eighty-two, he inhales life in big, energetic drafts. He is in many ways the quintessential World War II hero. He grew up poor on a farm in South Dakota at the height of the Depression. He lost his father when he was a teenager. He was inspired to fly when he saw another midwesterner, Charles Lindbergh, on a barn-storming tour. He worked at a gasoline station after high school to earn money for college and flying lessons. After playing football and graduating from the University of South Dakota, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1940. He quickly became one of the Marines’ most gifted pilots, and when war broke out he spent a year working at Pensacola as an instructor.

In the fall of 1942, Foss shipped out to Guadalcanal as the executive officer of a squadron of Marine F4F-4 Wildcat fighter planes. Foss remembers they were at sea, with their planes on a carrier, “wondering what it would really be like to finally be in the war.” They found out quickly enough when they were aroused from their berths in the middle of the night with the news that Japanese submarines were in the area and the pilots would have to launch their planes early.

Foss, who now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, remembers that once the squadron was off the carrier and headed for Guadalcanal, “I knew what war was going to be like. As we came in low to Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, we could see bomb craters all around and the antiaircraft guns were firing at Jap planes overhead. When we landed, the Marines on the ground gave us a big reception, cheering and everything.” Those Marines were happy to have the help. They had been fighting steadily since August just to gain control of the field and hang on to it.

Tom Brokaw with Joe Foss, Two for the Money game show, 1957

Foss said to one of the Marine fliers who had been there awhile, “Well, I guess you veterans will show us around.” Foss says the Marine answered, “Oh, you’ll be veterans, too, by tomorrow.” Actually, it took a week. On October 16, 1942, Foss shot down his first Japanese Zero. By November 19 he had shot down twenty-three, an extraordinary number, but the skies over the Pacific were filled with fighter planes and bombers as the United States and the Japanese battled for control of the air and the sea lanes leading to the mainland of Japan.

In fact, on the day he shot down his first Zero, Foss was nearly shot down himself. In those days, aerial combat was practically face to face. Foss and the other pilots didn’t have laser-guided weapons and sophisticated computer systems telling them when to shoot. Those aerial battles were accurately called “dogfights,” two snarling high-powered fighter planes twisting and turning, each trying to get the advantage, the pilots hitting the buttons to fire the machine guns, while they continued to fly at speeds of up to 300 miles an hour at altitudes ranging from just a few feet off the ocean surface to high in the clouds.

The F4F-4 Wildcat was not as quick or as responsive as the Japanese Zero, so when Foss’s plane was hit, he knew he was in trouble. He had three Zeroes on his tail as he went into a steep dive and then a big, wide turn, trying to get back to Henderson Field with a dead engine and his propeller free-wheeling. “The Zeroes stayed right behind me,” he says, “and as I cleared the hill to land at Henderson they unloaded all their lead at me.” Foss landed the plane at full speed, with no flaps and little control in what is called a “dead stick” landing. The F4F-4 careened across the runway and skidded to a stop just short of some palm trees. Later his ground crew counted more than two hundred bullet holes in the plane. Foss, then twenty-seven years old, sat in his cockpit, badly shaken, thinking, Why did I ever leave the farm? Suddenly he heard the cheers of the ground crew, “kids eighteen and nineteen years old who had watched it all,” he recalls, “and I said to myself, Well, you’re a leader, Joe. You’re in it all the way now, and from that point on I was just a full blower.”

By January 1943, Foss had shot down twenty-six enemy planes, equaling Eddie Rickenbacker’s record from World War I. He had been shot down and forced to ditch at sea, swimming through the Pacific waters for twelve hours until he was rescued by island natives in a dugout canoe. Two days later he was back in the air.

His exploits included a breathtaking maneuver in which he dove directly toward a Japanese battleship to deliberately draw fire and make it easier for other American planes to torpedo the vessel. As he started his dive he radioed to the rest of the squadron, “Keep it steep, girls, keep it steep.” He figured a plane coming straight down would be a difficult target for the battleship guns. He was right, but it was an extremely risky maneuver. When Foss pulled out at the last moment, he was so close to the ship he could see the Japanese officers on the bridge.

He was indestructible. Though he was knocked off the flight line for six weeks by a bout of malaria, he came back to fly again. Foss, who had learned to shoot pheasants and ducks on the wing as a boy on the South Dakota prairie, was a warrior of the old school, mourning the losses of friends from his squadron but never crying. He carried a Bible and a pair of dice in his flight-suit pockets, wore a leather helmet, and chewed on a cigar when he was on the ground. He had a Marine’s vocabulary and a bellowing voice. One of his squadron members would say of him, “All the balls of any man who ever walked the earth.”

In the spring of 1943, the Marines decided Captain Foss had done his share and brought him home to a hero’s welcome, less than a year after he had shipped out. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and was put on the cover of Life magazine, the ultimate press accolade during the war. He had a hero’s swagger but a winning smile to go with his plain talk and movie-star looks. Joe Foss was larger than life, and his heroics in the skies over the Pacific were just the beginning of a journey that would take him to places far from that farm with no electricity and not much hope north of Sioux Falls.

Before the war ended, he returned to the Pacific for another tour, and he was invited to Australia to brief a squadron of British Spitfire pilots. He had just started his talk when he noticed the Englishmen were not much taken with this rough-hewn Marine with the barnyard style of speaking. So, typically, he just confronted them in his direct, take-it-or-leave-it way. “I said to them, ‘I know what you birds are thinking right now. You’ve been up there in Europe flying against the Germans, and you don’t need any advice from me. Lemme give you a tip: You’re going to underestimate the Zero, and when you do you’re going to land on the deck.’ Well, they didn’t pay much attention,” Foss said, “and when they went up against the Zeroes over New Guinea, seventeen or eighteen of them were killed, including their best flier.” It was a moment that crystallized Joe Foss’s philosophy of skill over style.

When the war was over, Foss went home to South Dakota and opened a charter flying service and a Packard car dealership before getting involved in Republican party politics, first as a state legislator and then as governor in the mid-1950s. Whatever their politics, South Dakotans like me were proud to have such a blue-ribbon war hero as the state’s chief executive. We could count on our largely anonymous state getting more attention with Foss in charge.

Besides, Foss, for all of his acclaim, was a South Dakotan through and through. He loved to hunt and fish and he still knew his way around a farm. His speeches were usually rambling affairs, filled with Marine or prairie colloquialisms. For example, he still likes to remind audiences, “Hey, if we hadn’t put up a scrap back there during the forties, you’d be living under the Japs or the Germans and I don’t think you’d like that very much.”

It was during his terms as governor that I got to know Foss personally. When I was seventeen, I was elected governor of Boy’s State, a weeklong program organized by the American Legion to expose honor students to the structure of government and the challenges of politics. As governor, Foss came to a lunch in my honor and we hit it off. Later that summer, he invited me to become his partner on a national quiz show that wanted to cash in on his war heroics.

It was a very generous gesture from this nationally famous figure, to reach out to an obscure teenager and offer a spot by his side on Two for the Money, starring Sam Levenson, live from New York. All of the questions were about American politics, and we won $612 apiece, a small fortune in the preinflationary days of the fifties.

It was my first trip to New York, and when the show was over Joe asked what I was going to do. I explained I had to fly back early the next morning, but there was so much I wanted to see. He said, “I think you should stay a few extra days. I’ll get in touch with your parents when I get back and tell them it was my idea.” When I called home later that night to tell my folks that the governor thought I should stay a few days more, there was a long pause at the other end of the line. Finally, my father said, “Well, I think you should. You’ll probably never get to see New York again.”

Now that I’ve lived in Manhattan for more than twenty years, I often think of that night and the days that followed, when I went to Ebbets Field to see my beloved Dodgers in their final summer in Brooklyn, the trips to Greenwich Village, to the Statue of Liberty, and to the top of the Empire State Building, walking by Carnegie Hall, listening to Dixieland jazz from the sidewalk in front of the old Metropole Café at Times Square. By the end of my stay, I had a better understanding of what appealed to me and what I could handle. I knew somehow that this time my father was probably wrong. I would see New York again. Maybe Joe Foss knew that, too, as he encouraged me to stay.

In the fifties, Foss was busy on several fronts. In addition to his duties as governor, he was still flying as a senior officer in the Air National Guard and he was in demand at Marine reunions and other military gatherings around the country. But there were other challenges outside the public limelight. He had married his South Dakota girlfriend when he returned from the war, but they soon discovered that it was not a perfect union. Foss not only was gone a good deal on political or military trips, he was also an avid sportsman, so he had many invitations to far-off safaris and other hunting expeditions.

The marriage lasted longer than many troubled relationships because one of the Fosses’ children suffered from cerebral palsy, another from polio. Although these challenges temporarily united the couple, they also served to put strains on their marriage. In addition, Foss’s wife suffered from diabetes, a condition that would eventually take her life. The demands of their life became too much for the couple to endure, so they decided to separate.

The public by and large was not aware of the fissures in the Foss marriage. In those days the private lives of public officials remained just that, unless a scandal became too large to ignore. There was no scandal here, just a troubled marriage. Because Foss was active in the establishment of a children’s hospital in Sioux Falls to treat the handicapped, and was also the national president the Society of Crippled Children and Adults, an organization dedicated to the welfare of polio victims such as his son, it was a surprise to many in his home state when the Foss divorce became public knowledge.

By then Foss had left politics, having lost a race for the U.S. House of Representatives to another South Dakotan with a distinguished war record, George McGovern, who had won one of the military’s most coveted awards, the Distinguished Flying Cross, as a B-24 bomber pilot in the European theater. McGovern, a history professor, was as self-effacing as Foss was bold, but he was a much better politician, with a strong sense of his political beliefs and an ability to articulate them.

McGovern, who rarely mentioned his DFC or wartime service, went from the U.S. House of Representatives to the Senate before becoming the 1972 presidential nominee of a badly fractured Democratic party. As he campaigned hard for his prairie populist beliefs, against the Vietnam War, and for a liberal economic agenda, Richard Nixon and company portrayed him as a captive of the hippie left. McGovern was crushed in the general election, but his warnings about Vietnam and a budding scandal called Watergate proved to be prophetic. He remains one of the country’s most decent and thoughtful public servants. The DFC McGovern won for landing a crippled bomber and saving his crew is much more telling about his courage and patriotism than any whispered innuendo from the crowd that saw their president resign in disgrace.

After losing to McGovern, Foss went on to become the first commissioner of the fledgling American Football League, often appearing at games in a white cowboy hat with a bolo tie around his neck, exuding enthusiasm and sharing war stories or trading hunting tips with the eager men of his age and interests.

When, by mutual consent with the owners, he left the AFL in 1966, Foss went on to a variety of other jobs, including a starring role in his own television series, The American Sportsman. His primary role, however, remained that of being Joe Foss, war hero, or, as he liked to say, “bull in the woods.” He was a restless sort, so he liked to keep moving.

Money wasn’t all that important to him. He turned down $750,000 for the screen rights to his story in 1956, a veritable fortune at the time. He remembers the final meeting in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, what Foss called “that little café just off the lobby. I was in a booth with John Wayne on one side of me and the producer Hal Bartlett on the other. Wayne was to get a million dollars to play me. They asked me how I liked the script. I said, ‘Fine—except for that romance baloney. If you’re going to do a story on Joe Foss, you gotta take that out.’ ” The screenwriter, who had contrived a love story to go with the combat, said, “We need that to make a show for the public.” Foss explains, “I just turned them down flat. It wasn’t me at all.”

After all, Foss knew that what he had been through in the skies over the Pacific wasn’t a love story. It was kill or be killed, pure and simple. Or, as he once said, “Combat is dangerous. It tends to interrupt your breathing process.”

Foss’s breathing process was once almost interrupted in a freak incident, this one connected to his love of the outdoors. In the sixties, he suddenly became very ill, practically paralyzed and steadily losing weight. No one could figure out what was wrong until, finally, his condition was accurately analyzed as arsenic poisoning, probably from chewing on insecticide-soaked weeds while filming his television show.

That experience, and his second wife, DiDi, led him to a life-changing experience. Joe Foss became an enthusiastic born-again Christian. For an old whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking master of profanity who had been an absentee father and husband for much of his first marriage, it was a complete makeover. As a fundamental Christian who takes the Bible as the literal truth, Joe Foss had found a theology to match his personal philosophy: There is no middle ground in his life.

As president of the National Rifle Association, he was proud to appear on the cover of Time magazine with crossed six-guns. He believes fervently in the Second Amendment to the Constitution and thinks “that crew that wants to take the Constitution a section at a time has got it all wrong. The only piece of paper that’s outlasted the Constitution is the Bible. They both mean what they say.”

In Gary Smith’s riveting 1989 profile of Foss in Sports Illustrated, the journalist said that if Foss were “a traveling campfire, men would form a circle around him and warm themselves by the flame that men have always sought—certainty. And nudge each other in the ribs and grin and whisper, ‘Isn’t he a pisser.’ Because even if they thought he was wrong, he was still that rare thing, an original, himself.”

Foss has the same unapologetic attitude toward his religious beliefs. He told me his embrace of the Lord is “the greatest decision I ever made. I made it for eternity. In every speech I give I mention the Lord. I always end with, ‘In Jesus’ name, Amen.’ Now there are those who take me aside and say, ‘Joe, maybe you ought to leave Jesus out.’ ‘No, sir!’ I tell ’em.”

He simply can’t understand the shadings of modern life. President Clinton’s lawyers arguing about the meaning of his answers under oath triggered strong memories for Foss. “Folks now just don’t have an appreciation for what an oath means. When we took the oath when we were sworn into the Marines, it was a contract! That’s what we went out there to defend. I can still see my pals sitting around when we weren’t flying, guys like Casey Brandon and Danny Doyle, a couple of baseball players from Minnesota, talking about what we were going to do when we got back from the war. Well, they didn’t get back. I lost half my squadron. We all knew what an oath was about.”

Foss, for all of his strong feelings, isn’t a bitter old man. He still roars to life shortly after dawn on the Arizona desert, ready to fly off to give a speech at a Marine base change-of-command somewhere, or share with others what his embrace of Christianity has meant to him. He was pleased recently when a schoolboy member of his church asked him to come to his school for a day set aside to honor American heroes. Joe chuckles when he says, “Well, I got there and I was the only living hero. All the rest were George Washington and those guys. But at least the school was studying history and thinking about heroes.”

When I asked him if he thought more about those World War II days now than he did a few years ago, Foss said, “Yes, more people seem to be bringing it up. People seem to realize how the world would be different if we hadn’t put up that scrap.” When I ask if he missed the old days, he answered quickly, “Oh, no. I’m not a guy who missed anything from anywhere. I’ve always been a guy who just gets up and goes.”

It’s probably that quality that made him such a cool, daring, and effective fighter pilot. It’s also what makes him so engaging as a man. His unalloyed views on everything from guns to God to education to right and wrong may not match your own, but you know that he’s arrived at them honestly. And if you don’t agree with him, Foss, now in his eighties, may think of you as a “bird” or a member of “that crew,” his all-purpose mild epithets, but he won’t take time to hate you. He’s too busy for hate.

As he says of his World War II experience and what it should mean to others, “Those of us who live have to represent those who didn’t make it.”