Prologue

“Don’t argue with people who buy ink by the barrel.”

—AMERICAN APHORISM, ORIGIN UNKNOWN

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rapport with the press had deteriorated sharply since his first presidential term in office. Back in those honeymoon days of 1933, the newly sworn president had disarmed reporters with a fond and familiar manner—calling them by their first names, bantering about trivialities, writing birthday notes, and inviting their entire families to White House parties. His twice-weekly press conferences had been freewheeling and uninhibited. Filing into the Oval Office, the reporters were greeted by a cheerful, big-headed man in a well-worn, slightly rumpled suit, seated in his wheelchair behind a large mahogany desk. He was usually clutching a cigarette, and flecks of ash clung to the fabric of his sleeves. He took any question as it came, verbally and off the cuff. He kept the atmosphere light and mirthful. The president might remark that a reporter appeared hungover, for example, and ask the room for its opinion; or he might ask the security detail to confirm that a particular reporter had been frisked. He joked that he was running a “schoolroom,” and spoke to the journalists as if they were not especially bright grade school students: “No, my dear child, you have got that all wrong.”¹ Listening to a question, he let his mouth drop open in a parody of deep attentiveness. His facial expressions, with vaudevillian exaggeration, conveyed amazement, bewilderment, and alarm. While considering his answer, he gazed up at the Great Presidential Seal—set in plaster in the ceiling overhead—drew in a long breath, puffed up his cheeks, and expelled the air in a long blast. These antics brought forth hearty laughter from the reporters.

The president did not always reply directly—or truthfully, or at all—but he tolerated follow-up questions and engaged in informal back-and-forth exchanges. White House stenographers recorded every word of his 998 press conferences, including the small talk and badinage that opened each session. The transcripts run to many thousands of pages and occupy more than four cubic feet at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York.

By 1941, the first year of his third term in office, there were still flashes of that old warmth and wit—but now, more than in years past, White House reporters saw Roosevelt as a quicksilver character, temperamental and even inscrutable, a man of unfathomable depths. In one moment he lit up the room with his famous high-wattage smile; in the next he turned sour and snappish. It was not in FDR’s nature to shout, or even to raise his voice, but there was often a cantankerous undercurrent to his banter, and if he did not like a question he was liable to give a reporter the rough side of his tongue. According to Merriman Smith, a United Press correspondent, the president “could be as rough and tough as a Third Avenue blackjack artist, or he could be utterly charming, disarming and thoroughly likeable. It just depended on the question, who asked it and how Mr. Roosevelt felt when he got up that morning.”²

Calling out individual newsmen to rebut stories they had written, he pressed home his cross-examinations with the zeal of a courtroom litigator. Intolerant of euphemisms such as “error” or “inaccuracy,” FDR accused individual reporters of printing “lies”—or if that wasn’t clear enough, “plain lies” or “deliberate lies.”³ The term “lie” characterized the motive of the perpetrator, leaving no room for the possibility that an honest mistake had been made, but that was precisely his point. Deploring the trend toward “interpretive journalism,” he dogmatically insisted that newspapers should have no role in news analysis or commentary, even in the editorial pages. Syndicated columnists, said FDR, were “an unnecessary excrescence on our civilization.” They trolled for gossip—“buzz, buzz, buzz,” he called it—and passed those tidbits off as news. He labeled Drew Pearson, the most widely read columnist of the era, a “chronic liar.”⁴

At a press conference in February 1939, when questions implied that FDR was attempting to circumvent congressional restrictions on arms shipments to Europe, he launched into a tirade. “The American people are beginning to realize that the things they have read and heard . . . have been pure bunk—b-u-n-k, bunk; that these people are appealing to the ignorance, the prejudice, and the fears of Americans and are acting in an un-American way.”

Asked whether he believed the offending papers had deliberately misled their readers, FDR answered with a question of his own.

“What shall I say? Shall I be polite or call it by the right name?”

“Call it by the right name,” said one of the newsmen.

“Deliberate lie.”⁵

He read four or five newspapers each morning, usually before rising from bed. Roosevelt was a pious man who rarely swore, but the morning editions often put him into a seething fury, prompting a “damn,” or in severe cases a “goddamn.” As he read, his face darkened, his chin hardened, and his eyes glittered wrathfully. He might tear the offending story from the paper and bring it with him to the Oval Office, where he would thrust it into the hands of his press secretary, Stephen T. Early, complaining: “It’s a damn lie from start to finish.”⁶ He became convinced that most of the American press—85 percent was the proportion he often cited—was functioning as a mouthpiece for the embattled oligarchy. The “Tory press,” said Roosevelt, was shrewd, malevolent, and unscrupulous. It was owned and controlled by a cabal of rich conservatives who hated him personally and served up a daily diet of vitriol aimed at him, his political allies, his staff, and even his family.

In the pantheon of FDR’s archenemies, four newspaper moguls sat on high pedestals. William Randolph Hearst’s national newspaper chain often published identical editorials denouncing Roosevelt and his policies. Media analysts correctly surmised that the invective was orchestrated by the “chief” himself, who wired instructions to his editorial rooms from his garish castle at San Simeon on the California coast. Robert R. “Bertie” McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, openly despised Roosevelt and everything he stood for, and his paper—the second city’s leading daily and one of the nation’s most widely read newspapers—disparaged the administration without even the pretense of objectivity. McCormick’s cousin, Joseph M. Patterson, was founder and owner of the New York Daily News, the nation’s first tabloid. With its big-photograph format and sensationalist coverage of crime, sports, and sex scandals, the Daily News prospered throughout the Depression years, and its circulation eventually overtook that of the New York Times. Patterson had once called himself a socialist, and was initially sympathetic to the New Deal, but in 1940 he threw in with the isolationist movement and his paper turned sharply against FDR. Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, Joseph’s younger sister and Bertie McCormick’s cousin, was an eccentric and profane misanthrope who bought two Washington newspapers from Hearst and merged them into one: the Washington Times-Herald. By the late thirties, the Times-Herald had won the capital’s circulation battle and was one of the most profitable newspapers in the country. It was a blatantly partisan broadsheet that attacked the administration nearly every day, and sometimes several times per day in as many as four daily editions. Scurrilous anti-FDR editorials, signed “Cissy Patterson,” appeared on the front page. Newsboys hawked the paper on every downtown corner, and one or two were usually found shouting the latest headlines from the sidewalk just outside the White House gates.

None of the four was a stranger to FDR. McCormick and Joseph Patterson had been his Groton schoolmates, and he and Eleanor had been friendly with Cissy Patterson when she was a young debutante on the cotillion social circuit. Earlier in his career, Roosevelt had counted Hearst as an ally and had even called him a “friend.” His antipathy toward them, and theirs toward him, was intimate and deeply personal. Since three of the four were blood relatives, and the fourth (Hearst) was linked to the others by long-standing friendships and business dealings, FDR tended to regard the Hearst-McCormick-Patterson newspapers as a united front. But in 1940, as he ran for an unprecedented third presidential term, about three-quarters of all American newspapers opposed his bid for reelection, and FDR’s relationship with the press descended to its nadir. On the campaign trail, Roosevelt often went out of his way to denounce the newspapers, charging that they were failing to perform their vital role in American democracy. The press, he said, was a profit-seeking enterprise that found sensationalism and gossip more lucrative than sober, accurate reporting, and was polluting the nation’s civil discourse. That fall in the New York Times, Arthur Krock cited the president’s determination “to preach a class war against the press,” and his “steady implications that the press is unreliable and often venal.”⁷

After he defeated the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie in a popular and electoral landslide, the attitudes of many newsmen, editors, radio broadcasters, and columnists hardened against the president. FDR had broken 150 years of precedent by running for (and winning) a third term in office. Now more than ever, journalists felt a constitutional duty to defy the powerful president and keep him in check.

Looking back from the present, when his legacy has been engraved in marble, it is difficult to sense how polarizing and controversial a figure FDR was in his own time. It was taken for granted in media circles, even among journalists who liked him personally and were sympathetic to his policies, that FDR was an incorrigible trickster. He had often shown that he could manipulate or circumvent the press. He spoke directly to the American people by radio, and had done so with great success—but radio was still a fairly new medium, and many were concerned that it provided a means to weaponize political demagogy. On several occasions, during the debate between isolationists and interventionists over U.S. involvement in the European war, the president implied that his critics were treasonous. The critics, in turn, worried about the inevitable expansion of presidential powers in the event that the United States joined the war against Hitler. Anyone middle-aged or older could remember the repressive censorship regime imposed during the First World War. The “dignity” of President Woodrow Wilson had been held inviolable, and any criticism of the president or his policies, no matter how mild or well-meaning, had been grounds to prosecute or shut down an offending newspaper. FDR had served in Wilson’s administration as assistant secretary of the navy, so he bore a share of responsibility for those earlier abuses. H. L. Mencken, recalling the travesties of 1917–1918, warned his colleagues that it was their duty, in wartime even more than in peace, “to keep a wary eye on the gentlemen who operate this great nation, and only too often slip into the assumption that they own it.” If the newspapers did not resist with determination, they would yield to “a squeeze play that politicians have been working on them since the cradle days of the Republic.”⁸ And there matters stood on December 7, 1941, when the biggest news story of the twentieth century broke in the skies over Pearl Harbor.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE ATTACK, FDR hosted his regular Tuesday press conference, the first of the war. Reporters had been warned to arrive early at the White House, because new wartime security measures would cause long delays. New guard houses and sentry boxes had been erected throughout the grounds. Steel barricades and 10-foot-high sandbag embankments had appeared at every entrance. Machine guns had been set up on the roof. Soldiers in trench helmets carried rifles with bayonets fixed, and plainclothes Secret Service agents carried Tommy guns.

This was to be the largest press conference yet of FDR’s presidency. To accommodate the huge crowd, it was moved from the Oval Office to the East Room. Mike Reilly, chief of the president’s Secret Service detail, counted more than six hundred journalists gathered behind a rope line in the lobby, “milling and shoving like so many wild horses in a corral. We let them pass the barrier one at a time, identifying them and asking them to drop their lighted cigarettes as they entered the President’s office.”⁹

For the previous forty-eight hours, the press had been scrambling to report what had happened in Hawaii. Apart from a small number of specialists who had covered the army and navy, most reporters were largely ignorant of military affairs and could not even name the nation’s top-ranking generals and admirals. Press secretary Steve Early had been providing regular briefings since Sunday, but there was much that he could not tell them. Bits and pieces of the truth had filtered back from Pearl Harbor through the rumor mill: hints of sunken battleships, airplanes destroyed on the ground, thousands of servicemen killed and wounded. Hysteria and fear were in the air. The Press Club on Fourteenth Street was humming with rumors. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had coordinated the first tentative steps toward press censorship. The army had warned newspapers that nothing was to be printed about troop movements, and the navy had taken control of international telephone and telegraph offices. But in those first hectic days of the war, the government had not yet disclosed how and when news from overseas combat theaters would be reported to the American people.

The press conference was delayed for some time as Reilly’s security men double-checked credentials. Roosevelt sat behind a desk at the front of the room, with Early hovering nearby, as the last of the journalists and cameramen trickled in. The official stenographer recorded an offhand exchange between them.

“Tremendous crowd,” said Early.

“They will get damn little,” the president replied.¹⁰

FDR opened the conference by reading a series of announcements about war mobilization, and gave news of the various agencies involved in rationing and retooling civilian industries for munitions production. The issues of war reporting and censorship were not raised until the second half of the hour. When they were, it was evident that FDR and his advisers had barely begun to think about these issues.

“All information has to conform with two obvious conditions before it can be given out,” the president said. “The first is that it is accurate. Well, I should think that would seem fairly obvious. And the second is that in giving it out it does not give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

The reporters were evidently more than willing to abide by a censorship regime—the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor had dramatized the need to protect wartime secrets—but they were also eager to separate facts from rumors. If they received information from a nonofficial source, asked one newsman, what should they do with it? FDR said they must withhold it until the military censors could review it: “The papers are not running the war. The Army and Navy have got to determine that.”

The president was peppered with a series of questions about Pearl Harbor, and he answered with a minimum of detail. Asked to confirm that thousands of sailors had been granted leave and were in Honolulu on the morning of the attack, FDR shot back, “How do I know? How do you know? How does the person reporting it know?”¹¹ Rumors were bad enough in peacetime; in wartime they were potentially fatal to the war effort.

That night, FDR addressed the nation by radio in his first wartime “Fireside Chat,” reaching a record-breaking audience of 60 million. The speech repeated and amplified the points he had made in his lecture to the White House correspondents a few hours earlier. Rumormongering was an understandable impulse, he said, but it was potentially damaging to the morale of the American people. “Most earnestly I urge my countrymen to reject all rumors. These ugly little hints of complete disaster fly thick and fast in wartime. They have to be examined and appraised.” The enemy would spread lies and disinformation aimed at confusing and frightening the American people, and it was their collective responsibility to stand up to such propaganda tactics. Nothing reported by an anonymous source should be believed. He added a direct appeal to the news media:

To all newspapers and radio stations—all those who reach the eyes and ears of the American people—I say this: You have a most grave responsibility to the nation now and for the duration of this war.

If you feel that your Government is not disclosing enough of the truth, you have every right to say so. But in the absence of all the facts, as revealed by official sources, you have no right in the ethics of patriotism to deal out unconfirmed reports in such a way as to make people believe that they are gospel truth.¹²

In those early stages of the war, when the shock of Pearl Harbor was still fresh, leaders in the news media adopted a constructive attitude toward censorship. No editor, reporter, or radio broadcaster wanted to be blamed for harming the Allied cause, whether intentionally or inadvertently. All agreed, at least in principle, that vital military secrets must not fall into the enemy’s hands through the medium of a free press. A popular trade journal told its readers: “As between an ethical professional requirement that a journalist hold nothing back and a patriotic duty not to shoot one’s own soldiers in the back, we have found no difficulty in making a choice. Freedom of the press does not carry with it a general license to reveal our secret strengths and weaknesses to the enemy.”¹³

Mindful that the government had overplayed its hand during the First World War, FDR moved cautiously. He expressed his personal distaste for censorship. “All Americans abhor censorship, just as they abhor war,” he said in a statement shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “But the experience of this and of all other nations has demonstrated that some degree of censorship is essential in wartime, and we are at war.”¹⁴

By January 1942, the federal government had established its basic policy. Reporting from overseas would be handled by “war correspondents” accredited by the army or navy, and their stories would be submitted to military censors prior to publication. But newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasters at home would be subject to a strictly voluntary regime, with no provisions for prior government censorship and no new enforcement mechanisms. They would be asked to abide by a “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press,” which listed categories of information to be withheld from publication for the duration of the war: troop movements, ship departures, war production statistics, the weather, the locations of sensitive military installations or munitions plants. No reference was to be made to information derived from intelligence sources, the effectiveness of enemy defensive measures, or the development of new weapons or technologies. For fear that spies or saboteurs might try to communicate through the American media, newspapers were asked to discontinue “want” ads placed by the public. For the same reason, commercial radio stations were to scrub open-microphone programs, call-in shows, and “man on the street” interviews. They would no longer take musical requests or broadcast local notices concerning lost pets, club announcements, or meetings.

A new federal agency, the Office of Censorship, was charged with implementing these measures. Byron Price, a veteran newsman who had most recently been executive editor of the Associated Press, was appointed director. Upon assuming his new post, Price vowed to resign before he allowed press freedoms to be curtailed, as they had been during the First World War, on such vague or capricious grounds as “public interest” or “national morale.” The attorney general retained certain enforcement powers under the Espionage Act of 1917—which remained on the books then, as it does today—but Price’s office would have nothing to do with penalizing or prosecuting newspapers. Instead, the agency hired career journalists to act as “missionaries”—that was the term chosen by Price—to travel around the country and persuade editors and broadcasters to abide by the code. The system of voluntary self-censorship, said Price, “put newspapers and other publications on their honor. It enlisted every writer and every editor in the army of the republic.”¹⁵

THE FULL DIMENSIONS OF THE CATASTROPHE at Pearl Harbor were not yet known by the public, but the reports and rumors left no doubt that the Japanese had struck a shattering blow against the Pacific stronghold. Speaking to the press a week after the attack, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox admitted that several battleships had been destroyed, and others seriously damaged; he also revealed that almost 3,000 sailors and other servicemen had been killed. Investigations were underway, both in Congress and in the armed services. Knox stated that “the land and sea forces were not on the alert,” implying that the local commanders had been derelict.¹⁶ Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, the top commanders in Hawaii, were summarily relieved of their commands. They would be reduced in rank, forced to retire, and run through a gauntlet of nine largely redundant investigations that deflected blame away from Washington.

The news from the rest of the Pacific, meanwhile, was confusing and ominous. Hours after hitting Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had launched an aerial Blitzkrieg across a 3,000-mile front, striking American and British targets in Micronesia, the Philippines, Malaya, Burma, and Hong Kong. On the third day of the war, torpedo planes sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya. Japanese invasion forces had landed at multiple beachheads on the island of Luzon and other islands in the Philippine archipelago. The American commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, was leading his army in a desperate but gallant fight against superior enemy forces—or at any rate, that was the impression given by the sketchy and somewhat baffling early reports from the far side of the earth.

Although the truth would not come out until years later, MacArthur’s conduct on the first day of the war had been at least as culpable as that of Kimmel or Short. Receiving nine hours’ warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, MacArthur had remained cocooned at his headquarters and refused to communicate with his air commanders, despite their repeated efforts to reach him. As a result, his main force of B-17 bombers and P-40 fighters was paralyzed for lack of orders, and more than half of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground by the first Japanese air raid on Philippine territory. Leaders in Washington were dismayed by this “second Pearl Harbor,” hours after the first, but no one outside a privileged circle even knew that it had happened. Press reports on December 7 only stated that Japanese airplanes had been spotted in Philippine airspace. Three days later, the White House announced that the Japanese had attacked Clark Field, an air base north of Manila, but offered no details: “General Douglas MacArthur thus far has been unable to report details of the engagement.”¹⁷

The different standards of accountability imposed in Hawaii and the Philippines have bothered historians ever since. The latter events were never formally investigated, and MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii. The discrepancy can only be explained as a peculiar result of the way the opening sequences of the Pacific War were reported in the United States. If MacArthur was to be relieved of command, the action needed to be taken immediately, or not at all—and it was not taken immediately. And by the second week of the war, the mood of the American people had changed. Now they seemed eager for a redemptive narrative that would expunge the trauma and shame of Pearl Harbor. MacArthur’s beleaguered army, half a world away, with little hope of support or reinforcement, was making a stirring fight against long odds. The man at the head of that army seemed a brave and noble figure, an American paladin straight out of central casting. His daily war communiqués, composed in a style ranging from the lurid to the vainglorious, kept the American people in thrall. “Sartorially he was dashing, physically he was handsome, orally he was spectacular,” a press commentator later wrote of MacArthur. “For all his sixty-two years, he was straight as a ramrod, clear-eyed, rosy-cheeked and only partly bald. His features were even, his expression imperious, and the rake of his braid-encrusted hat added a touch of romance to his elegant facade.”¹⁸

Very suddenly, in those early days of the war, Douglas MacArthur rocketed to superstardom in the American media, attaining a degree of fame, celebrity, and popularity unmatched by any other military commander. His rocket would soar over the Pacific, in a majestic, high-flying trajectory, until Harry Truman shot it down ten years later.

The Philippines were doomed from the outset, and probably would have been even if the Japanese had not hit Pearl Harbor. The initial Japanese assaults on the islands, and many other Allied territories throughout the western Pacific, were executed with great skill and overwhelming air superiority. But MacArthur was willing to fight, and also to make a good show of fighting, and Americans revered him for it. Between December 8, 1941, and March 11, 1942, MacArthur’s headquarters issued 142 press communiqués. One hundred nine mentioned only one person by name: MacArthur. Rarely were individual units singled out for praise or credit; the communiqués typically referred only to “MacArthur’s army,” or “MacArthur’s men.”¹⁹ Often it was implied that he was personally leading his forces in the field, when he was actually at his headquarters in Manila.

The press-savvy general knew the value of a short, headline-ready remark. “We shall do our best,” he told newsmen, on the fifth day of the war.²⁰ When someone suggested removing the American flag from the roof of his Manila headquarters, so that it would not attract the attention of Japanese bombers, MacArthur replied, “Keep the flag flying.”²¹ These soundbites were quoted in his communiqués, and appeared the next day as headlines across the United States. He knew just how to pose for photographs, with an erect posture and a certain set of the head, like a white marble statue on a plinth. On the cover of Time magazine on December 29, 1941, MacArthur stood proud and resolute, gazing into the distance. Newsreel producers turned up old footage of MacArthur inspecting troops, addressing the cadets at West Point, or being kissed on both cheeks by a French general. Congress voted to rename a conduit road in the District of Columbia, west of Georgetown, as “MacArthur Boulevard.” The Red Cross launched a national fund-raising drive during “MacArthur Week.” Universities granted him honorary degrees in absentia. A dancing convention in New York introduced a new dance called the “MacArthur Glide.”²² The Blackfeet Indians adopted MacArthur into their tribe, naming him Mo-Kahki-Peta, or “Chief Wise Eagle.” New York publishing houses rushed to publish “instant” MacArthur biographies—actually, hagiographies—and although they were thinly researched and hastily written, they sold briskly: MacArthur the Magnificent; General Douglas MacArthur: Exciting Life Story; and General Douglas MacArthur: Fighter For Freedom.

On the general’s sixty-second birthday on January 26, 1942, congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill delivered full-throated birthday panegyrics, each speaker apparently trying to top the sentiments offered by the last.²³ The next day the Philadelphia Record told its readers: “He is one of the greatest fighting generals of this war or any other war. This is the kind of history which your children will tell your grandchildren.”²⁴ On February 12, 1942, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Boston, Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican presidential candidate in 1940, urged that MacArthur be recalled to Washington and placed in charge of directing the global war. “Bring home General MacArthur,” Willkie thundered. “Place him at the very top. Keep bureaucratic and political hands off him. . . . Put him in supreme command of our armed forces under the president. Then the people of the United States will have reason to hope that skill, not bungling and confusion, directs their efforts.”²⁵

For FDR and his military chiefs, the nation’s breathless absorption in the story unfolding in the Philippines begged the ominous question: How was it going to end? Could MacArthur be reinforced, or even resupplied? General George C. Marshall asked his new deputy, the recently promoted Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to investigate the problem from every angle and propose a solution. Eisenhower had served under MacArthur in the Philippines from 1935 to 1939, so he knew as much about conditions in the country as any officer in Washington. He noted that Marshall did not even hint at the “psychological effects” on the American people, but he thought the implication was impossible to miss: “Clearly he felt that anyone stupid enough to overlook this consideration had no business wearing the star of a brigadier general.”²⁶

In a nutshell, the dilemma was that the Philippines could not be saved, but they could not be abandoned outright. They could not be saved because the Allies could not yet muster even a fraction of the shipping, naval strength, and air power needed to fight across the Pacific. A rescue mission would only increase the scale of the defeat; any ship attempting to run the Japanese blockade to reach the Bataan Peninsula, where MacArthur’s army was besieged, would be sunk or captured. No matter how the figures were calculated, Bataan would run out of provisions, ammunition, and other needed supplies long before the Allies could mobilize forces on a scale needed to return to the Philippines. On the other hand, Eisenhower told Marshall, the besieged army could not be “cold-bloodedly” abandoned to the enemy. Even if hard military logic dictated cutting losses, the United States was a great nation with a reputation to uphold. It must try to get at least some supplies into Bataan by submarine, blockade runners, and airplanes. Even if it amounted to little more than “driblet assistance,” and even if it prolonged only by a few weeks the inevitable surrender, “we must do everything for them that is humanly possible.”²⁷ Marshall agreed, and authorized Eisenhower to spend virtually any amount of funds to make the token shipments.

MacArthur had given no indication that he wanted to abandon his army. He kept a loaded derringer pistol with him and vowed that he would not be taken alive. But his young wife and four-year-old son were also with him in the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor Island, off Bataan. To leave the general and his family to their fate would invite a public backlash against the Roosevelt administration. General “Pa” Watson, the influential aide to FDR, had been urging the president to order MacArthur out of the Philippines, arguing that he was worth “five Army Corps.” The proposal was to smuggle the general to Australia, and to place him in command of the eventual counteroffensive.

Mulling it over in his diary on February 23, Eisenhower recorded prophetic views about MacArthur: “He is doing a good job where he is, but I’m doubtful that he’ll do so well in more complicated situations. Bataan is made to order for him. It’s in the public eye; it has made him a public hero; it has all the essentials of drama; and he is the acknowledged king on the spot. If brought out, public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him.”²⁸ When FDR finally decided to order MacArthur out of the Philippines, and to appoint him supreme commander of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific, Eisenhower lamented: “I cannot help believing that we are disturbed by editorials and reacting to ‘public opinion’ rather than to military logic.” Eisenhower would play no role in the Pacific War—he would be busy elsewhere—but in early 1942 he foresaw all of the various headaches that MacArthur would cause for leaders in Washington. MacArthur would use his political influence and his unparalleled access to the American media to demand that more troops, ships, and airplanes be sent to his command. He would reject the “Europe-first” principle as a basis for global strategy. He would meddle in Australian politics. He would insist on running the naval war in the Pacific. He would claim the right to liberate all of the Philippines before any final offensive against Japan. Leaders in Washington would have to reckon with MacArthur’s singular influence at every stage of the coming war, Eisenhower predicted, for “the public has built itself a hero out of its own imagination.”²⁹

ERNEST J. KING, THE HATCHET-FACED SEAMAN who led the U.S. Navy, was determined to have nothing to do with the press. When President Roosevelt had offered to make him commander in chief of the U.S. fleet (“COMINCH”) a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, King had taken the job on the condition that he would not be required to appear at press conferences. He said that his concern was to protect wartime secrets, and his staff batted away interview requests by explaining that King did not want to give “aid and comfort to the enemy.”³⁰ But Washington journalists rightly suspected that Admiral King’s hostility ran deeper—that he regarded them as gatecrashers from a contemptible civilian demimonde of hacks and gossips. According to one, King seemed to rank them “somewhat above bubonic plague as something to be avoided at all costs.”³¹

This instinct was widely shared among the navy brass. Naval officers tended to regard reporters as pests—dangerous pests, who might spill the navy’s secrets. And they were wary of newspapers’ tendency to build stories around individuals, particularly those with colorful or forceful personalities. Personal publicity of the kind lavished on Douglas MacArthur, they believed, was incompatible with the navy’s team-before-player ethos.

King and his contemporaries had begun their naval careers at the turn of the twentieth century, in the period after the Spanish-American War. In those years, a bitter public quarrel had broken out between William T. Sampson and Winfield Scott Schley, two senior officers who had commanded naval squadrons at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898. Each man claimed credit for winning the battle, and each belittled the role of the other. The two officers and their partisans vied for public acclaim and traded accusations and insults in print. A court of inquiry, convened in September 1901, was given headline coverage in the press, especially in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst; but the court issued a divided ruling, which only inflamed the spectacle. President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to suppress all public discussion of the dispute, fearing that it had tarnished the navy’s victory over Spain, but the contretemps continued to echo in the newspapers for years afterward, and was even the subject of one of the earliest American silent films: The Sampson-Schley Controversy (1901).

To the midshipmen who passed through the Naval Academy in those years, the unbecoming public spectacle left a lasting impression. The navy’s triumphs in the late war had lifted the United States to the status of a global military power. The service should have been basking in acclamation, planning for the future, and consolidating its standing in Washington. Instead, Sampson and Schley and their respective followers, seeming to care only for their own selfish interests, had hung the navy’s dirty laundry out on a public clothesline. That generation of young officers, which included King (Class of 1901), William Leahy (1897), William Halsey (1904), Chester Nimitz (1905), and Raymond Spruance (1906), swore to themselves and each other that they would never let it happen again. By the 1940s, most Americans had forgotten the Sampson-Schley affair, if they had ever heard of it. But the admirals of the Second World War remembered it well. They took pride in a culture of teamwork, cool professionalism, and personal modesty, and tended to shun newspapermen altogether if they could get away with it.

But the crucible of war would soon expose the risks and limits of the navy’s aversion to publicity. Its failure to provide adequate and timely information about the naval war left a vacuum in the public’s understanding of the subject—and inevitably, as if by a law of physics, wild rumors and speculation rushed into that vacuum. No one questioned the need to protect military secrets, but in the early stages of the war, when Japanese forces rampaged across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, influential voices in Washington charged that the navy was abusing its control over war reporting to conceal its fiascos. Worse, leading Republicans accused the navy of carrying water for FDR and the Democrats by managing the news flow with an eye toward the 1942 midterm congressional elections. That was a false charge, but a damaging one, and Admiral King eventually understood that he would have to refute it, or stand accused of trespassing into the demilitarized zone between war-fighting and politics.

Equally pressing was the question of the navy’s status in the postwar defense establishment. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, congressional leaders of both parties had vowed to streamline the military’s organizational chart. The War and Navy Departments, which had been independent and coequal since the administration of John Adams, were to be merged into a unitary department of defense under a single civilian cabinet officer. Although the specific arrangements remained to be negotiated, the army, navy, marines, and air forces would be fused into an integrated command structure. FDR persuaded Congress to postpone those reforms until the war was won—but anyone could foresee that service unification was destined to be a political brawl of epic proportions, in which the navy had much to lose in the way of command autonomy and clout. Secretary Knox and his undersecretary, James Forrestal, who each had backgrounds in journalism, warned King and the admirals that the struggle had in a sense already begun, and that the navy had better “tell its story” to the American people. Forrestal noted that the army was already making its case to congressional leaders through back channels, and “it is my judgment that as of today the Navy has lost its case and that, either in Congress or in a public poll, the Army’s point of view would prevail.”³² In August 1944, Forrestal told King: “Publicity is as much a part of war today as logistics or training and we must so recognize it.”³³

IN THE WEEKS AFTER PEARL HARBOR, hundreds of working journalists applied to the War and Navy Departments to be accredited as war correspondents, the forebears of today’s “embedded journalists.” According to the army’s Basic Field Manual for Correspondents, these frontline reporters would be subject to military authority and would be required to “submit for the purposes of censorship all statements, written material, and photography intended for publication or release.”³⁴ Although they would remain civilians, they were to wear plain khaki uniforms with brass shoulder insignias identifying them as “Correspondent,” “Photographer,” or “Radio Commentator.” In all, through the end of the war, about 1,600 war correspondents were accredited by the armed forces.

Journalists shipping out as war correspondents were told to pack their bags and be ready to leave the country with ten hours’ notice. Like soldiers and sailors, they were forbidden to disclose sailing dates or destinations, even to their own editors or loved ones. They would travel with the troops, either by air or by sea. Although they had no rank, they were allowed officers’ privileges, meaning that they messed with officers and shared the same berthing and living arrangements. As civilians, they were not supposed to salute nor to be saluted—but since they wore khaki uniforms, they frequently were saluted by officers and enlisted men. Strictly speaking, if they were to follow protocol, they ought to refrain from returning salutes. On the other hand, none wanted to give offense. No official solution to this dilemma was ever decreed. According to William J. Dunn, a CBS radio correspondent posted to Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, most of his colleagues adopted the custom of not saluting first, but returning salutes as “a matter of simple courtesy.” Whenever coming face-to-face with high-ranking officers wearing “a bevy of stars,” however, they found themselves raising their hands to their foreheads quickly and instinctively, protocol be damned.³⁵

War correspondents and press liaison officers were natural enemies. In most overseas military headquarters, their working relationship was inevitably fraught with misunderstandings and ill feelings. At the root of the problem was a mismatch between their respective professional cultures and attitudes. Military men of all ranks were accustomed to operating in a chain of command. If an order seemed capricious or illogical, it was not the soldier’s first instinct to demand an explanation or justification. The slang acronym SNAFU (“Situation normal, all fouled up”), which gained wide currency during the Second World War, summed up the serviceman’s resigned acceptance of regulations and procedures that appeared to defy reason. That stoic attitude did not come naturally to the civilian journalist, who had always felt free to argue with his editor if he thought he was right.

In some overseas headquarters, especially during the first year of the war, press sections practiced a system of “blind censorship.” Censors reviewed each story with a red pencil, crossing out whatever sentences or paragraphs they deemed unsuitable, and then cabled the censored version directly back to the United States. The author was not notified of the edits and redactions, nor given any explanation for them, nor allowed to rewrite and resubmit. In some cases, a story vanished into the censor’s “kill file,” and the reporter who had written it received no word of the decision. Only later would he learn whether his story had “passed” and how much of it had eluded the red pencil. It was galling to see his hard work disappear into such a vortex. Fierce arguments inevitably ensued. The press officer, conscious of his authority and his responsibility to protect secrets, was not inclined to back down. When five war correspondents at a headquarters in New Zealand approached their press censor with a list of complaints, he told them, “I’m not afraid of you any more than I would be of five Japs.”³⁶ Another press office distributed a mimeographed form letter in response to protests:

MY FRIEND:

It is with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat that I listen to your sad tale of woe. Allow me to offer my deepest and sincerest condolence. However, I do not have the Chaplain’s duty and I am short of towels. Please see the Captain of the Head for material for drying your eyes.

PEACE ON YOU, MY FRIEND,

Chief Censor³⁷

But it was the press officer’s bad luck to be pitted against adversaries who were not cowed by authority, and whose ranks included some of the most lethal polemicists and name-callers in the world. The New Yorker correspondent A. J. Liebling profiled the press officers he encountered at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in London. As civilians they had been corporate publicity agents or “Chicago rewrite men,” Liebling observed—but then the war had transformed them into army majors and colonels who had never been to boot camp or laid eyes on a battlefield. They were feckless “dress extras,” immaculately turned out in finely tailored, starched uniforms, who spoke of the army with a practiced “unctuousness.” Before the war they had not been respected as journalists; now they were not respected as army officers. Possessing a certain flair for legerdemain and spin, they had “adapted themselves to this squalid milieu and flourished in it.” In May 1945, just after V-E Day, when the loss of his press credentials would no longer impose a career penalty, Liebling opened fire in the pages of his magazine. He denounced the use of censorship for “political, personal, or merely capricious reasons” and announced that the time had come to expose “the prodigious amount of pure poodle-faking that has gone on under the name of Army Public Relations.”³⁸

In Hawaii, where Admiral Chester Nimitz was commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), correspondents soon learned to their dismay that the stolid white-haired Texan was determined to give them nothing interesting or quotable. Newspapermen seemed to think that the man sent to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor ought to look and talk like a salt-stained swashbuckler out of a boy’s adventure novel. But Nimitz, as one of them observed, could have passed for a “retired banker.”³⁹ According to Time magazine correspondent Bob Sherrod, the CINCPAC was “the despair of his public relations men; it simply was not in him to make sweeping statements or to give out colorful interviews.”⁴⁰

Nimitz’s first formal press conference, which he gave only after being pressured to do so by Navy Secretary Frank Knox, was held on January 29, 1942, a month after he took command in Pearl Harbor. The war correspondents were ushered into his office at his headquarters, which was housed for the moment at the submarine base in the Navy Yard. They found Nimitz seated behind a standard-issue wooden desk, dressed in plain khaki with no necktie. He did not rise to greet them. The walls were bare but for an analog clock, a calendar, and a map of the Pacific. The journalists sat on folding chairs that had been set up for the occasion. Nimitz read a prepared statement setting out the command arrangements that had been established between the army and navy. All of that information had already been released in Washington, so it was not news. Then he took questions. Yes, he did expect to hold and defend the Hawaiian Islands. No, he did not care to elaborate. New York Times correspondent Foster Hailey asked for “some reassuring word for the people back home as to the operations of the Navy since December 7.” One imagines the collective sense of letdown as the reply was given: “Admiral Nimitz said that any statement as to the operations of fleet units must come from Washington as part of the grand strategy of the war.”⁴¹

That month, again under pressure from Knox, Nimitz brought on a full-time public relations officer. This was Waldo Drake, a commander in the naval reserve, who had previously been the shipping news correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The practice of commissioning civilian reporters as press officers was based on the premise (as one naval officer put it) that “one hippopotamus can talk to another hippopotamus.”⁴² Drake made a good first impression with the war correspondents, pledging that the door to his office at Pacific Fleet headquarters would always be open to them. But his job was largely thankless, because his boss continued to regard working with the press as a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to communicate with the public. Drake’s authority did not extend beyond Pacific Fleet headquarters, but there were many other military commands on Oahu—including those of the army, the Army Air Forces (USAAF), and the Fourteenth Naval District—and the various headquarters had their own censorship practices and public relations strategies.⁴³

Day after day, the correspondents knocked on Drake’s door to air their complaints. News given out by Pacific Fleet headquarters was already generally known, they said. The sluggish pace of Drake’s censorship procedures meant that their stories were already stale when they arrived on the mainland. Too few of them had been permitted to go to sea with the fleet. When Wake Island was taken by the Japanese, censors removed the name “Wake” and identified it only as “an island.” A correspondent asked, “Is there anybody in the navy who thinks that the Japs are under the impression that they have taken some other island?”⁴⁴ As the result of an administrative snafu, correspondents were invited to a press briefing with Admiral Robert English, commander of the Pacific Submarine Force. But Nimitz had decreed a complete news blackout of the submarines, so Drake was obliged to rush into the room and put an end to it. He collected all of the reporters’ notepads before allowing them to leave.⁴⁵ In an incident that anticipated Joseph Heller’s satirical novel Catch-22, a news story was passed by both army and navy censors, but the navy censor altered one of the paragraphs. Finding that it did not like the navy’s version, the army suspended the credentials of the correspondent who had written it, even though the fellow had not seen the amended version until it appeared in print.

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 several 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:

He entered the room quietly, and what impressed me right away was that he was alone! No fussing aide or overattentive public relations type to steer him past such reefs as might come up. It was just Ernest J. King, Admiral, USN, perhaps a little tense as one might be who has committed his fate to dubious hands. He was, nonetheless, completely poised, projecting an air of authority, of command, without having to make the slightest effort. Great men may enjoy the ruffles and flourishes, but they do not need them to win instant respect.

Nelie walked the Admiral around the room, presenting each correspondent in turn. He shook hands with each, a quick, firm pressure, repeating the name and accompanying the words with a keen eye-to-eye look. The eyes were not at all unfriendly, but it was no great trick to imagine that under less favorable circumstances they might look as though forged from the same steel that protected his battleships.⁶⁸

After the introductions, all were seated—King in an easy chair in the corner, the reporters arrayed in a rough circle around him. Beer was served from an ice-filled washtub. The men drank directly from bottles.

King began speaking off the cuff, and for the first hour or so the reporters did not interrupt him at all. He gave a complete chronological narrative of the global war, beginning with the problems he had faced in getting convoys across the Atlantic in 1941, and then the attack on Pearl Harbor, the early crises in the Pacific, the victory at Midway, and the vicissitudes of the fight for Guadalcanal.

The journalists hung on every word. Vast strategic and logistical complexities were suddenly made clear to them. King’s masterful summary of the big problems of the war was a priceless education in itself—but when he moved to specifics he displayed an astonishing grasp of detail, including technical data. He drank a second beer, then a third; every fifteen minutes or so he lit a new cigarette. Most remarkable, or so it seemed to the newsmen, he spoke with complete candor about the mistakes the navy had made, and did not appear to hold anything back for the sake of security. “He told us what had happened, what was happening, and, often, what was likely to happen next,” one recalled. “He reported the bad news as fully as the good news, and in many cases, explained what went wrong on the one hand, and what strategy, weapon, or combination of both, had brought success on the other. Throughout, he was completely at ease and always patient, welcoming the questions that frequently interrupted his narrative, and answering them frankly and easily.”⁶⁹

Many questions were asked about the situation in and around Guadalcanal, where it was known that the United States had suffered heavy air and naval losses. Could the Americans hold the island, or would a tactical withdrawal become necessary?

“We’ll stick,” said King. Explaining that the fighting in the Solomons had been savage and desperate, he admitted that the navy had suffered heavy losses. But there were good reasons to keep slugging it out. The Japanese were suffering too, and they could not easily replace their losses. Geography worked to the Allies’ advantage, because the Japanese did not have airbases nearby. King explained how and why the navy chose to announce its losses, and warned that Japanese claims were often inflated by tenfold or more. He noted that Bill Halsey had recently been appointed South Pacific commander, and predicted a pitched sea battle in the coming weeks.^†

“Doesn’t this mean you’re risking losing the fleet?” asked the columnist Walter Lippman.

King replied: “Isn’t that what it is for?”⁷⁰

The meeting broke up after three hours, and King departed after shaking every reporter’s hand. Some stayed behind to talk among themselves, while others hurried away to commit all they could remember of the discussion to notes. They were stunned by their good fortune and felt as if they understood the Second World War better than they ever had before. One remarked that “King was—above all—a realist; that he did not indulge in wishful thinking or close his eyes to unpleasant problems in the hope that they would go away.”⁷¹ As for controversies surrounding the reporting of past sinkings, the journalists accepted King’s explanations and concluded that he and the navy had been unfairly maligned.

To his surprise, King had enjoyed every minute of the evening. In a sense he had been talking to himself, telling himself the whole story of the war; and the experience had even helped to clarify some of his own thinking. Upon arriving at his office the next morning, he called Nelie Bull and asked, “When do we have the next one?”⁷²

King’s secret Alexandria press briefings continued throughout the remainder of the war, at an average rate of about one every six weeks. More correspondents were invited, and their numbers eventually swelled to near thirty. The journalists nicknamed themselves the “Arlington County commandos,” and in good cloak-and-dagger fashion they gave King a codename: “The Thin Man.” When Secretary Knox learned of the briefings, he gave his hearty approval even though the admiral had subverted his authority by starting them in the first place. None of the secrets disclosed by King ever appeared in print.

Admiral King soon realized that he had acquired a fund of goodwill in the Washington press corps. This was an intangible asset, but it did not take him long to discover its value. Congressman Maas had been sounding off in Congress and in the media about disunity in the high command, and was pushing legislation to merge the armed services into one integrated command structure. King believed that the existing Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) organization was working well enough, and that a service unification bill should be postponed until the end of the war. He discreetly reached out to several of the Arlington County commandos. Within twenty-four hours, major newspapers across the country ran news articles and editorials opposing Maas’s views, but without mentioning King’s name. Soon thereafter, with the support of FDR and congressional leaders, service unification was shelved pending the end of the war.

In 1941, King had arrived in Washington determined to have nothing to do with the press. Before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, he was manipulating it from behind the scenes like a veteran Washington wire-puller. On first impression, it was a surprising reversal. But after further reflection it was not surprising at all, because no one had ever mistaken Ernest J. King for a slow learner.

AT GENERAL MACARTHUR’S SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA (SWPA) headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, the press section was run by Colonel LeGrande “Pick” Diller, a career army officer who eventually rose (while serving in that role) to the rank of brigadier general. Diller was a charter member of the “Bataan gang,” the insular circle of MacArthur loyalists who had served in the Philippines before the war and joined him in escaping Corregidor in March 1942. The SWPA press operation never lacked for funds or manpower: Diller eventually had more than one hundred officers and enlisted personnel in his chain of command, including a long roster of captains and majors, many of whom would be promoted to full-bird colonel by war’s end. In contrast to the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor, where Nimitz and his staff were dismayed by the relentless flood of journalists from the mainland, Diller adopted a “more the merrier” attitude and was always delighted to issue a new set of press credentials. The number of accredited reporters, photographers, and radio newscasters in Brisbane eventually surpassed four hundred.

Diller and his team treated the correspondents like valued clients. They replied promptly to all queries; they arranged access to state-of-the-art communications and broadcasting facilities; they looked after the journalists’ “creature comforts” when they were touring forward combat areas. They provided regular access to MacArthur himself, albeit in carefully stage-managed press conferences. Diller composed the first drafts of SWPA’s near-daily press communiqués, which were then reviewed and often rewritten by MacArthur. Correspondents soon learned that no actual or implied criticism would survive Diller’s red pencil, while on the other hand, the thicker they laid on the praise and adulation, the more they would be rewarded with exclusive stories and other desirable privileges.

The newsmen gave Diller and his team high marks for alacrity. In pointed contrast to the situation in Hawaii, news stories submitted to MacArthur’s press office were reviewed, censored, approved, and transmitted back to the United States within twenty-four hours, so that the news was still fresh when it appeared in the newspapers. Fresher news was more likely to be treated as front page news, whereas the comparatively stale bulletins from Nimitz’s theater were more likely to go into the back pages. That, in turn, contributed to the American public’s impression, quite common in 1942 and 1943, that MacArthur was doing most of the fighting in the Pacific.

More than any other American military leader of the war, MacArthur understood the importance of visual imagery. He paid diligent attention to the details of his wardrobe and accessories, which cynics called his “props”—his battered Philippine field marshal’s “pushdown” cap, his well-worn leather flight jacket, his aviator sunglasses, and his corn-cob pipes, which tended to grow larger over time. During his first days in Australia, he had experimented with an ornate carved walking stick, but discarded it after someone remarked that it made him look older. He was sensitive about his expanding bald spot, and when it was necessary to be photographed without his hat, he took a private moment to comb his hair across the top of his head, leaving a perfectly straight part about two inches above his right ear—a deftly executed version of the coiffure known as a “combover.” Photography, like press copy, was subject to Diller’s censorship—and most published wartime photographs of MacArthur were taken at a low camera angle, making him appear taller than he was.

The Brisbane publicity machine often gave the misleading impression that MacArthur was personally leading his forces in battle. As a theater commander, it was not MacArthur’s role to lead forces in the field, and his extraordinary valor in the First World War had left him with nothing to prove. Still, it was galling to the men actually doing the fighting, who had rarely if ever laid eyes on MacArthur, to learn from an American newspaper that he had been sharing in the dangers and privations of the front lines. In October 1942, after he made a brief flying trip to Port Moresby, an Allied base in southeastern New Guinea, Brisbane-based war correspondents reported that MacArthur had toured the combat zones around Buna, near the island’s north coast. The stories were vetted and approved by the SWPA censors. A photograph of MacArthur watching a field exercise in Rockhampton, Australia, was released to the press with the location falsely captioned as “the front.” Newsreel footage depicted him seated in the back of a jeep, bouncing along a muddy jungle road, while the narrator told viewers that the general was touring forward fighting positions. In truth, a towering range of jungle-clad mountains had separated him from the nearest Japanese troops throughout his entire visit.⁷³

These blatant fabrications irritated Robert L. Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army, who concluded that the SWPA press office was abusing its powers of wartime censorship to indulge MacArthur’s personal vanity. General Eichelberger was learning the bitter lesson that Eisenhower and others had learned before him—that if a subordinate officer wanted to get along with MacArthur, he had better keep his name out of the newspapers. After he was quoted and photographed in several press accounts about the Buna campaign, Eichelberger was summoned to Brisbane to be dressed down by MacArthur, who asked: “Do you realize that I could reduce you to the grade of colonel tomorrow and send you home?”⁷⁴ Eichelberger took the point, and for the rest of the war he shunned the press. To a visiting public relations officer, he said: “I would rather have you slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than to have you give me any publicity.”⁷⁵

From the start of the war, MacArthur always asserted his right to issue his own press communiqués, and he resisted pressure from Washington to tone them down. General Marshall and Secretary Stimson did not like the sensational pronouncements from Brisbane, and they questioned the accuracy of MacArthur’s claimed battle results. Truth was often a casualty of the SWPA publicity machine. Action reports were punched up to make them seem more exciting and dramatic, and in many cases not only was the language improved, but new “facts” were liberally added. In some instances, statistics concerning enemy losses were invented wholesale. Moreover, many SWPA communiqués appeared to contain a none-too-nuanced subtext aimed at the navy or at operations in Nimitz’s theater. The most notorious of these was issued in March 1943, after a successful air attack on a Japanese troopship convoy off the northern coast of New Guinea, in an action subsequently called the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Employing a new low-altitude tactic called “skip bombing,” Lieutenant General George C. Kenney’s Fifth Air Force bombers had sunk a dozen enemy ships, including eight transports and four escorting destroyers. P-38 fighters had shot down about twenty Japanese planes flying air cover over the convoy and driven perhaps twenty more away. The transports had carried about 8,000 Japanese troops, of whom at least 3,000 were killed in the attacks or drowned afterward. (The exact number has never been tallied, as many escaped to nearby shores by clinging to wreckage or were rescued by small craft.)

The bravura performance was a tactical breakthrough for the USAAF, whose land-based bombers had often struggled to hit enemy ships at sea. But the subsequent SWPA communiqués claimed grossly exaggerated results: twelve transports, three light cruisers, and seven destroyers sunk, and 102 Japanese airplanes “definitely observed as put out of action.” Furthermore, a communiqué asserted, the convoy had carried an estimated 15,000 Japanese troops, of whom “all perished.”⁷⁶ In an accompanying statement, also released to the press, MacArthur seemed to draw from this single action the far-reaching lesson that airpower had won strategic dominion over seapower, with the implication that the Army Air Forces had won its ongoing meta-argument with the navy. In the future, he declared, command of the sea would be decided by land-based aviation rather than naval power: “The Allied naval forces can be counted upon to play their own magnificent part, but the battle of the Western Pacific will be won or lost by the proper application of the air-ground team.”⁷⁷ Flabbergasted admirals demanded that Marshall and Stimson call their man to heel.

The inflated results claimed by MacArthur and Kenney could not withstand scrutiny, and they began to unravel when pilot reports and interrogations of prisoners picked up at sea revealed that the entire convoy was smaller than the number of claimed sinkings. But when General Marshall forwarded corrected estimates to Brisbane, asking that the SWPA headquarters issue a revised communiqué, MacArthur erupted. In a long cable to Marshall that has to be read to be believed, he named twenty-one of the twenty-two ships that his forces had allegedly destroyed, asserted that the results had been conclusively verified by captured Japanese documents and prisoner interrogations, and demanded that Washington revise its figures to bring them into line with his previous report. He added that he was prepared to defend his claimed results “either officially or publicly.” Moreover, if the War Department intended to issue any public document “challenging the integrity of my operations reports,” he wanted to know the names of the men behind it, “in order that I may take appropriate steps including action against those responsible if circumstances warrant.”⁷⁸

The moonshine in MacArthur’s press communiqués was gratuitous and unnecessary, because his military achievements, in 1943 and 1944, were quite real. His advance up the coast of New Guinea, his landings in New Britain, his bold surprise amphibious landing on Los Negros-Manus, his long jump up the northern New Guinea coast to Hollandia—all those moves were deftly planned and executed. Kenney’s bombers did wipe out the better part of an important convoy; they did improvise a new and lethal tactic to sink ships at sea, a feat that had eluded them in the past. MacArthur’s forces had ample cause to take justifiable pride in their achievements, and the controversy surrounding his communiqués only tended to tarnish what should have been regarded, quite properly, as a winning South Pacific counteroffensive.

Critics branded MacArthur a narcissist and a megalomaniac, but his souped-up publicity had a calculated purpose. It was a bid for political influence at home. Diller later said that the general “was trying his level best to get as much help for the Pacific and for our forces as he could, and consequently he tried to keep the story attractive so that people would be sympathetic to his support.”⁷⁹ In MacArthur’s mind, he was pitted against a cabal of enemies in Washington. FDR was his archnemesis, a man he knew well and cordially despised. MacArthur often told his claque that the president had “betrayed” him at the outset of the war by failing to send forces to relieve the Philippines. He was frustrated by the division of the Pacific into two separate theater commands, with the northern realm commanded by Nimitz. He regarded the navy as FDR’s pet service—which was not far wrong—and tended to distrust all naval officers as spies or usurpers. But MacArthur’s influence in the news media posed a greater problem for the army than for the navy. Marshall, Stimson, and the army leadership in Washington struggled to keep the SWPA commander in line. He was constantly testing the limits of insubordination, often threatening in barely veiled terms to take his case to the public, and any internal disagreement was likely to resonate in the papers and in Congress.

At a visceral emotional level, MacArthur believed that the War Department had failed his army in the Philippines. He ranted about the (mostly) faceless and nameless conspirators—“they”—who had taken control of the army and were plotting to undermine him. “They” had based the global Allied strategy on a principle of “Europe first,” a policy he abhorred, and was always ready to denounce as a historic folly. “They” had denied him the forces he needed to turn back the Japanese offensive in the South Pacific. “They” were a clique of deskbound, political generals who were jealous of his public renown, and thus eager to lay him low. “They” were on the spot in Washington, while he was in Australia, half a world away from the seat of power. He had been away a long time—away from Washington, and away from the United States since he had left in 1935; he had even retired from the U.S. Army, serving as Field Marshal of the Philippine Army until appointed U.S. Far East commander by FDR in July 1941. His long physical estrangement had put him at a political disadvantage, or so he believed—and therefore he must do whatever was necessary to make his influence felt in Washington. Only by such means could he hope to obtain the troops, weapons, ships, and airplanes he needed to win the Pacific War, and to win it according to his own playbook. He must beat “them”—his Washington-based antagonists—at their own game, and that meant outbidding them for popularity with the American people.⁸⁰ He wanted singular authority over the war, to absorb Nimitz’s forces into his own command; but failing that, he wanted at least to ensure that his theater received the lion’s share of Allied assets in the Pacific. He wanted his own strategic ideas to predominate over those of the navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Allies, which meant above all that he should liberate the Philippines (including and especially the main northern island of Luzon) as early as possible. Under no circumstances were the Philippines to be bypassed in favor of a more direct route to Japan itself.

In private conversations, MacArthur freely admitted that his aggressive public relations strategy was an instrument to achieve these ends. “They are afraid of me, Bob,” he told Eichelberger in early 1944, “because they know I will fight them in the newspapers.”⁸¹ MacArthur had to “win the war every morning in his communiqué,” observed a correspondent attached to his headquarters. “He had to convince the public that Roosevelt and the dastardly Chiefs of Staff were withholding from him the weapons that were rightfully his.”⁸²

In his 1964 autobiography, Reminiscences, MacArthur maintained that he never gave a moment’s consideration to seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1944. The truth is that he cooperated willingly with a “kitchen cabinet” of powerful Republicans, business leaders, and media owners who shared a zealous desire to be rid of FDR, and regarded MacArthur as their best and only hope of defeating the popular incumbent in a wartime election. The SWPA commander discussed the project with various associates and subordinates, including General Eichelberger, who told his wife in June 1943, “My chief talked of the Republican nomination—I can see that he expects to get it and I sort of think so too.”⁸³ The first public inkling of MacArthur’s potential candidacy came in April of that year, when Secretary of War Stimson announced that active-duty officers could not remain in uniform while running for office. Leading Republicans, including Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg and Congressman Hamilton Fish, interpreted this announcement as a shot across MacArthur’s bow. Each spoke out against Stimson for having meddled in politics, and each received a letter of thanks from MacArthur for his trouble.

Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, unofficial chairman of the crypto-campaign, warned that MacArthur must not be seen to lift a finger to seek the nomination. His opportunity would come only in the event that the Republican convention, meeting in Chicago in June 1944, found itself deadlocked between the leading candidates, Thomas Dewey and Wendell Willkie. In that scenario, the party might nominate MacArthur by general acclamation. Vandenberg planned strategy with other leading supporters, including the newspaper owners Hearst and McCormick; retired general and Sears executive Robert E. Wood; Congressman Carl Vinson; and Time-Life publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce. The stateside supporters met periodically with senior members of MacArthur’s staff during their visits to the United States. (Many leading SWPA staff officers were none too scrupulous in conducting political work while shuttling between Australia and Washington on military aircraft.) As the primary season approached, MacArthur carried on a correspondence with his backers, but he chose his words carefully for fear that his letters might fall into the wrong hands. To Vandenberg, for example, he wrote: “I am most grateful to you for your complete attitude of friendship. I can only hope I can some day reciprocate. There is much more I would like to say to you which circumstances prevent. In the meantime I want you to know the absolute confidence I would feel in your experienced and wise mentorship.”⁸⁴

Biographers and historians have debated whether MacArthur really wanted the presidency. Some surmise that his only purpose was to exert pressure on FDR and the Joint Chiefs to put him in charge of the entire Pacific War, and to allocate the resources he needed to win it. Perhaps he was conflicted; perhaps he was flattered by the attention. MacArthur felt a burning desire to return to the Philippines, to free his army from its awful captivity, and to raise the American flag over Bataan. As president he would see those things done, but he would not do them himself. As a student of American history, he must have known that he would risk ending his career as another George B. McClellan, the Union general who had unsuccessfully challenged Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1864. Probably MacArthur liked the idea of responding to a groundswell of public acclaim, so long as he did not have to campaign for it. And he must have relished the vision of defeating FDR at the polls. The two men had known one another a long time; they had been colleagues, rivals, and even “friends,” in the shallow sense in which the term was sometimes used in Washington. MacArthur had been army chief of staff at the outset of FDR’s presidency. He had heatedly opposed FDR’s military budget cuts in 1934, and had behaved (even by his own account) with borderline insubordination toward the new president. Like many political conservatives, MacArthur regarded the New Deal as a homegrown strain of Bolshevism. Privately he referred to FDR, with ironic disdain, as “cousin Frank”—or with a crude anti-Semitism common on the political right of that era, as “Rosenfeld.”⁸⁵ On several occasions, according to Eichelberger, MacArthur said that he would not want the Republican presidential nomination “if it were not for his hatred, or rather the extent to which he despised FDR.”⁸⁶

In early 1944, as the Republican primary campaign began in earnest, press reports based on anonymous sources suggested that MacArthur was preparing to return to the United States, where he would campaign full-time for the nomination. Vandenberg went public in an article for Collier’s entitled, “Why I Am for MacArthur.”⁸⁷ A report approved for publication by Diller summed up the views prevailing in Brisbane: “It would not be surprising if General MacArthur felt—as do a good many here—that the shortest way to victory would be to place an experienced military man in the White House.” When asked on the record about the subject, all of the men around MacArthur gave the same stock answer, a coy nonreply: “Let’s get on with the war.”⁸⁸ The syndicated columnist Raymond Clapper asked MacArthur directly and repeatedly whether he was interested in the Republican nomination, but he never got a straight answer: “Each time he acted as though he didn’t hear me.”⁸⁹ It was noted that MacArthur had been placed on two state GOP primary ballots, in Wisconsin and Illinois—and in neither case did he ask that his name be removed.

A few iconoclastic journalists began to raise questions. Was it proper for a theater commander, in the midst of fighting a terrible war, to flirt with electoral politics at home? Given that MacArthur’s image was refracted through wartime media and warped by his own press censors, was it fair that he should compete against candidates who had no such advantage? Few Americans knew how unpopular MacArthur was among the rank and file of his own army. In the glare of the campaign spotlight, a backlash was inevitable. The January 1944 issue of the American Mercury supplied it. John McCarten, one of Henry Luce’s former editors, had traveled to Australia and returned, thus evading Diller’s censorship. In a harshly critical profile, McCarten wrote that MacArthur’s performance as a general had been overrated, that he was obsessed to an unbecoming degree with his public image, and that the imposition of heavy-handed censorship in his SWPA headquarters was an intolerable manipulation of the political process. McCarten highlighted the role of the anti-FDR press in creating and sustaining a “MacArthur cult.” He suggested that MacArthur was not qualified for the role he sought—that of Pacific Supremo—because he was “a ground general . . . in a predominantly aerial and naval theater.”⁹⁰ Claims that MacArthur was not personally involved in the presidential campaign were not believable, wrote McCarten, and if he wanted to eliminate speculation, he should quote General Sherman’s famous statement of 1884: “If nominated I will not accept, and if elected I will not serve.”⁹¹

MacArthur was infuriated by the American Mercury article, even more so because it happened to be included on a reading list distributed to servicemen overseas through the Army War College library service. In a long cable to Marshall, he called the article “scandalous in tone and even libelous” and complained that it parroted Japanese propaganda.⁹² But he chose not to refute it directly because (he told Eichelberger) it contained “a thread of truth which prevented his answering it.” To be attacked in such terms, he lamented, was a “cross it was necessary for him to bear.”⁹³ He would have been even more chagrined had he possessed the power to see into the future, because on many counts McCarten’s “hatchet job” anticipated views that have since become conventional among historians.

In any event, the dark horse candidacy of Douglas MacArthur had entered the home stretch and was about to pull up lame. Tom Dewey, governor of New York, had shown unexpected strength with Republican voters and power brokers, and by late March it was clear that he would defeat Willkie. There would be no deadlock in Chicago, and therefore no chance to draft MacArthur onto the ticket. The shambolic finale was triggered by an unauthorized release of embarrassing letters written by MacArthur to a Nebraska congressman, Arthur L. Miller. Miller had urged MacArthur to accept the party’s call to serve: “You owe it to civilization and to the children yet unborn,” for “unless this New Deal can be stopped our American way of life is forever doomed.” Unwisely trusting to the congressman’s discretion, the general had written back directly, stating that he agreed “unreservedly” with the “complete wisdom and statesmanship of your comments.”⁹⁴ Without asking MacArthur’s permission, Miller released the letters to the press on April 14. They were promptly reproduced in full in major newspapers across the country. If Miller had believed they would boost the MacArthur candidacy, he was badly mistaken. Vandenberg regarded the disclosure as a “magnificent boner” and a “tragic mistake.” I. F. Stone, writing in The Nation, concluded that the letters depicted MacArthur “in a very unsoldierly posture—disloyal to his Commander-in-Chief and a rather pompous and ignorant ass.”⁹⁵

According to MacArthur’s 1964 autobiography, that was the moment when he first learned that “my name was being bandied about” as a potential candidate on the GOP ticket—and having suddenly been alerted to the ridiculous and dishonorable project, he acted quickly and manfully to put an end to it. He released a statement disavowing presidential ambitions and dismissing any such interpretation of the Miller letters as “sinister.”⁹⁶ When this first statement was deemed too equivocal, he released a second on April 30, 1944, concluding: “I request that no action be taken that would link my name in any way with the nomination. I do not covet it nor would I accept it.”⁹⁷

That ended MacArthur’s foray into presidential politics, at least in the 1944 election cycle. The sordid episode would be remembered as a minor footnote in his career. In a larger sense, however, the misadventure left an indelible mark on the last year of the Pacific War. Vital issues of global strategy had been dragged into the arena of partisan politics, and would remain there through the election. Governor Dewey, having accepted his party’s nomination, said in a speech on September 14, 1944: “Now that General MacArthur is no longer a political threat to Mr. Roosevelt, it would seem appropriate that his magnificent talents be given greater scope and recognition. . . . General MacArthur has performed miracles with inadequate supply, inadequate airpower and inadequate force.”⁹⁸ Though innocuous in tone, Dewey’s remark contained a serious charge against the president, and by implication against the Joint Chiefs of Staff—that they had allowed politics to guide the allocation of military forces in the Pacific. Dewey did not pursue this line of attack, perhaps because he knew that the Joint Chiefs would refute the charge, but the damage had been done. Roosevelt never forgave Dewey, and the 1944 campaign was the bitterest of his career.

Fundamental questions of grand strategy remained unresolved in the Pacific. Would MacArthur be given the green light to liberate all of the Philippines, including the main northern island of Luzon? Would Ernest King win his case for seizing Formosa? Should the Americans land on the coast of mainland China—and if so, would that lead to a wider direct involvement of U.S. forces in the Sino-Japanese war? More broadly, what was to be the endgame against Japan? Could Japan be persuaded to accept terms of surrender prior to a bloody invasion? What role might Hirohito, the Showa emperor, play in the war’s final act? These were complicated and immensely important decisions, and they could not be postponed indefinitely. Nor could the presidential election calendar be moved; come hell or high water, the voters would go to the polls on the first Tuesday in November. Inevitably, the big strategic issues looming in the Pacific would be decided in a political season—and they would be viewed through the prism of politics, by contemporaries at the time and by historians ever since.

* COMINCH to CINCPAC, June 8, 1942, Message 2050, CINCPAC Gray Book, book 1, p. 559. According to Floyd Beaver, a signalman on Admiral Fitch’s flag allowance, Johnston and Seligman were “buddy-buddy,” roaming about the ship like “Siamese twins.” Author’s interview with Floyd Beaver, January 17, 2014. Johnston’s book, Queen of the Flat-Tops, confirms the impression.

† The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, which effectively decided the campaign in favor of the Allies, was fought on November 12–15, 1942.