A VERY REAL personal ghost had never left the Kimmel household, never really would leave. While the Admiral was testifying in Washington, a “Finding of Death” notice had come from the Navy Department. Following investigation, the notice told the family, it could now be presumed that the Kimmels’ eldest son, Manning, had indeed perished.
The Admiral had hoped against hope for almost eighteen months. Confusion over USS Robalo’s fate had added to his torment. After a long period of no news, a report months earlier had suggested that the submarine had gone down off the Philippines, following an explosion. Manning and others had reportedly survived in the water for many hours, swimming toward a nearby island. He had last been seen swimming on his back, in a state of exhaustion, and was thought to have drowned.
Another report, however, included Manning’s name in a list of four men said to have made it to the shore and been taken prisoner by the Japanese. Then Manning and another man had supposedly been shot dead while trying to escape. With the war in the Pacific over and with access to witnesses in captured territory, further fragments of information would come in.
Now, with notification that his son was presumed dead, the Admiral pressed the Navy for more information.
As harrowing details began to come in, he shared them with his sons Tom and Ned but not with Dorothy. What he was being told, he knew, might turn out to be inaccurate. “I see no good purpose,” he told Ned in a letter, enclosing one of the reports, “in showing this to your Mother.” But Kimmel harbored no lingering notion that Manning could still be alive. “I am afraid,” he wrote to the mother of a Robalo crewman, that “this very definitely closes a chapter.”
In little private ways, it never would do that. The Admiral could not bring himself to cross out the entry for Manning in his address book. There had been a moment, too, when grief mingled with bitterness, betraying his dark suspicion of what President Roosevelt’s political maneuvering had been in the days before Pearl Harbor. “That son-of-a-bitch,” he had exclaimed when he learned of Manning’s probable death, “killed my son!”
On compassionate grounds Tom Kimmel, the other submariner brother, had been transferred to a shore job after Manning was listed as missing. Before the war ended, however, he was given a command of his own and went back to sea. As the conflict ended, he boarded and brought to port two surrendering German U-boats. A year later, back in the Pacific, he supervised from the bridge of his submarine as wreaths were strewn on the ocean in memory of Americans who had died at sea during the conflict. A Kimmel had returned to Pearl Harbor.
Through it all, ever since the catastrophe that had been blamed on her husband, Dorothy Kimmel had been quietly supportive of him. Like him, she had received threats and endured baseless lies and insinuations. There had been an allegation right after the attack that—asserting her privilege as the wife of the commander in chief—she had bumped two pregnant Navy wives off a flight from Hawaii to California. Dorothy had been able to reply, courteously and truthfully, that she had never set foot in Hawaii.
A story had gone the rounds, the Admiral had revealed while testifying to Congress’ Joint Committee, that he got his job as commander in chief because Dorothy was—supposedly—the niece of Democratic Senator Alben Barkley, the Committee’s Chairman. They had, Kimmel said, never met. Relatives today know of no connection between the two families.
The Admiral’s wife had had enough, and liked to think her husband had too. “We are both fed up with this Pearl Harbor affair,” she had written to relatives. “It is driving us crazy. It is wonderful to have the War over, but it has brought tragedy and sorrow to my family. I think of Manning every minute and wish a miracle would bring him back. It’s hard to enjoy anything anymore.”
As the Joint Committee wound up its work in early 1946, Tom Kimmel advised his father that it was time to ease up. “You have worked and slaved and suffered over this business,” he wrote home. “You have done all that is humanly possible to bring out the truth. I think you should drop any further activities in connection with this case . . . You owe it to yourself and to Mother.”
Kimmel himself said he meant “never again to become too much concerned over this affair.” Perhaps he meant it. He would never let go, however, of some of the perceived lies that had been told, and of the personal hurt. There was one man, especially, whom he would never forgive.
During the hearings in Congress, there was a moment when Kimmel’s lawyers and former CNO Stark’s lawyers got together to discuss how tense the relationship was between their respective clients. They got Kimmel and Stark to shake hands. It was clear, though, one of the attorneys would recall, that Kimmel was just going through the motions and was “mad at Stark . . . bitter.”
The bitterness went back to the one-on-one breakfast meeting between the two men in 1942, soon after Pearl Harbor, when Stark let slip the fact that Washington had received MAGIC intelligence that Kimmel had not. The souring of their relationship had begun then.
After the Japanese attack, but before that fateful meeting, Kimmel had told Stark in a letter that he appreciated what he was doing to help in his predicament. “I will always value your friendship,” he had written, “which is a precious thing to me.” In his reply, Stark had signed his letter, “As always, Sincerely, Affectionately, and Faithfully.”
They had been friends for more than forty years, since their Naval Academy days. Stark described Kimmel as “one of the closest and finest” friends he ever had. “I had the highest regard for him,” Kimmel for his part later said of Stark. “I felt that he was one of my best friends . . . I trusted him . . . But I can’t forget the fact . . . well, the events that have occurred since then.”
In the year or so following the 1942 meeting, “Betty” Stark had tried to repair the rift. At the height of the war, from London, he had sent an effusive note wishing Kimmel “Happy Birthday.” His greetings, he wrote, came “with all the good old wishes, and affection, and esteem, and everything else that I have held for you—and then some. Best of luck, keep cheerful.” Kimmel’s files do not indicate that he replied.
In the fall of 1943, Stark tried again. He had recently had a chance encounter with the Admiral’s son Ned, then serving aboard the USS Ranger, which was in harbor in Britain. “Dear Mustapha,” Stark wrote, using Kimmel’s old nickname: “On a trip north to the Fleet . . . a smiling face came in, and ’twas Ned. I could have hugged the boy, I was so glad to see not only him but just someone from the family . . . My thoughts are often with you and Dot and, as you know, they are loyal, happy thoughts . . . Here’s hoping that when this old war is over we will all be together again. Keep cheerful, Betty.”
When the two admirals next met, it would be outside the Navy Court of Inquiry as Stark—covered in glory after having successfully directed the U.S. Navy’s part in the D-Day landings—was about to testify. It was clear at once that Stark’s overtures had not placated Kimmel. Stark had entered the waiting area, lawyer Hanify remembered, “smiling and obsequious. Kimmel was serious, stern, and tight-lipped . . . Stark was obviously anxious for an opportunity to talk with Kimmel, learn his mood.”
Kimmel’s mood was “extremely bitter,” Admiral Hart, who represented Stark before the Navy Court, told the former CNO in a letter before the proceedings began: “As the country seems to hold him as the Number 1 criminal, and way out ahead of Short in that respect, I personally think he has rather good grounds for said bitterness.” Hart was bothered, he told Stark well in advance, that the former CNO had kept no diary. To describe that as “unfortunate,” he told his client, was an understatement. His other concern was the need to keep certain “very secret” matters behind closed doors. For those reasons, Hart had hoped Stark would not be obliged to testify.
It would have been better had he kept a diary, Stark agreed. In the seven days he spent on the stand, the combination of protecting MAGIC and demonstrating a hopelessly poor memory—one of Kimmel’s attorneys termed it “a curious amnesia”—did him no favors.
Time after time after time, Stark responded to questions with “I don’t recall,” “I don’t know,” “Not the slightest recollection,” or “I couldn’t say.” Asked whether he recalled the events of December 6th, the eve of the attack, he replied with a flat “No.” Had he received any information by telephone that night—when the White House had called saying President Roosevelt had been trying to reach him? “No,” he responded; “I say I don’t recall.” Did he recall the matter of the much-anticipated “Winds” weather forecast, which for days before the attack had been the object of intense search by the Navy, by the Army, and others? That, he said, rang no bells at all.
With hindsight, read today, Stark’s testimony seems on its face to be at best vacuous, at worst evasive. Kimmel’s counsel Rugg was able to pose the questions he did thanks to the background he had gleaned, not least the leaks from chief codebreaker Safford. Stark, though, was by and large—at a moment when the MAGIC intercepts were not yet available even to the closed Navy Court—duty-bound to fend off many questions.
Less than three weeks later, on August 28th, the dozens of MAGIC intercepts—obtained after much persistence by Kimmel’s legal team—were released into the Court record. Stark, called to testify again, was asked about the messages between Tokyo and its consulate in Hawaii that had betrayed a special, increasing focus on the exact position of U.S. warships in Pearl Harbor.
All the messages he was asked about had been decoded and translated in the days just before December 7th. One was a request for Japan’s spy in Honolulu to report not once but twice a week; another asked for information on ships’ positions at anchor in specific areas of Pearl Harbor; another asked for fullest possible details on Navy air bases. Stark responded no more than to say he “might” have seen a given intercept, or that he did “not recall it at this time.” Had the intercepts been discussed at headquarters? They might have been, Stark said, but he did not remember.
Three weeks earlier, in the same hearing room, he had been asked whether he was aware of any “important development of which Admiral Kimmel was not advised, as it occurred, by the quickest secure means then available.” Stark had replied: “I have searched my brain, my conscience, my heart, and everything I have got, since Pearl Harbor started, to see wherein I was derelict, or wherein I might have omitted something.” He had been able, he said, to think of only one thing. He wished now that on the morning of December 7th he had personally warned Kimmel, perhaps by phone, that an attack was possible somewhere in the Pacific at 1:00 p.m. Washington time, 7:30 a.m. at Pearl Harbor.
“I may be reminded before this investigation is over,” Stark had said on the stand, “of other things . . . something more I should have done.” It had become clear, by the time he finished testifying, that there was much more that he—or others in the department—should have shared with Kimmel. The former CNO knew how badly his testimony had gone over. “Perhaps,” he wrote afterward to Hart, he had been “trying too hard to be so one-hundred-per-cent-plus honest, so that in spots I may have made more or less a mess of it. I know I was depressed.”
“Part of the trouble” while he was testifying, he told Hart, could have been “my fondness and loyalty to Kimmel, my actual desire to share the burden and protect him so far as I could.” Against the background of the long, long friendship they had shared, coupled with the hard fact that Stark had failed to ensure that Hawaii had access to MAGIC, Stark’s testimony had struck Kimmel as quite the opposite of sharing the burden. So far as he was concerned, his friend had turned out to be an “awful liar.”
Stark’s note of sympathy, handwritten following the announcement that Kimmel’s son Manning was missing in action, failed to move Kimmel. The Admiral took time to respond to virtually all such letters, but not to that one. It still lies in the file today, marked: “No answer.”
In December 1944, after the Secretary of the Navy had followed up the Navy Court’s verdict with a statement that there would be no courts-martial—and with a public but less than ringing vote of confidence in Kimmel—Stark tried again.
Dear Mustapha,
While I know nothing can ever undo much that has been done to you, I want you to know that no one could have had greater satisfaction than I when I read the decision recently published in the papers, that there was no grounds for courts martial for Pearl Harbor; and I trust this gave you too at least some degree of satisfaction.
My every good wish, as always,
Keep cheerful.
Sincerely,
Betty
The ingratiating tone of this latest missive, referring to a public statement that Kimmel thought invidious, was the last straw. The Admiral restrained himself until after Christmas before attempting a reply. His first draft began, “As I read your note of 12 December 1944, I am forced to conclude that your mind is affected or that you think mine is.” It ended, “May God forgive you for what you have done to me, for I never will.”
In the last of three drafts, all of which survive in his files, the Admiral wrote—with no opening salutation (his handwritten additions are shown in brackets here):
I am astonished that you could and would write me such a letter as that of yours of 12 December and I can easily see why no one could have greater satisfaction than you upon the publication of the decision that there were no grounds for courts martial for Pearl Harbor.
You betrayed the officers and the men of the Fleet by not giving them a fighting chance for their lives and you betrayed the Navy in not taking responsibility for your actions; you betrayed me by not giving me information you knew I was entitled to and by your acquiescence in the action taken on the request for my retirement; and you betrayed yourself by misleading the Roberts Commission as to what information had been sent to me and by your [self serving lapse of memory] before the Court of Inquiry.
I hope that you never communicate with me again and that I never see you or [hear or see] your name again that my memory may not be refreshed of one so despicable as you.
Before mailing the letter, Kimmel consulted with his legal team. Senior counsel Charles Rugg doubted whether Stark’s note to the Admiral merited a response. The drafts would be found years later, following Kimmel’s death, still lying in his desk drawer. There is no evidence that the two friends ever had personal contact with each other again.