(One)
Office of the Chairman of the Board
Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation
San Francisco, California
16 January 1942
The ten-story Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building had been completed in March of 1934, six months before the death of Captain Ezekiel Pickering, who was then Chairman of the Board. There were a number of reasons why Captain Pickering had two years before, in 1932, ordered its construction, including, of course, the irrefutable argument that the corporation needed the office space.
But it was also Captain Pickering’s response to Black Tuesday, the stock market crash of October 1929, and the Depression that followed. Pacific & Far Eastern—which was to say Captain Pickering personally, for the corporation was privately held—was not hurt by the stock market crash. Captain Ezekiel Pickering was not in the market.
He had dabbled in stocks over the years, whenever there was cash he didn’t know what else to do with for the moment. But in late 1928 he had gotten out, against the best advice of his broker. He had had a gut feeling that there was something wrong with the market when, for example, he heard elevator operators and newsstand operators solemnly discussing the killings they had made.
The idea of the stock market was a good one. In his mind it was sort of a grocery store where one could go to shop around for small pieces of all sorts of companies, or to offer for sale your small shares of companies. Companies that you knew—and you knew who ran them, too. But the market had stopped being that. In Ezekiel Pickering’s mind, it had become a socially sanctioned crap game where the bettors put their money on companies they knew literally nothing about, except that the shares had gone up so many points in the last six months.
The people playing the market—and he thought “playing” was both an accurate description of what they were doing and symbolic—often had no idea what the company they were buying into made, or how well they did so. And they didn’t really understand that a thousand shares at thirty-three-and-a-quarter really meant thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty real dollars.
And it was worse than that: they weren’t even really playing craps with real money, they were buying on the margin, putting up a small fraction of the thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty and borrowing the rest.
Ezekiel Pickering had nothing against gambling. When he had been twenty-nine and First Mate of the tanker Pacific Courier, he had once walked out of a gaming house in Hong Kong with fifty thousand pounds sterling when the cards had come up right at chemin de fer. But he had walked into the Fitzhugh Club with four thousand dollars American that was his, not borrowed, and that he was prepared—indeed, almost expected—to lose. To his way of looking at it, the vast difference between his playing chemin de fer with his own cash money at the Fitzhugh Club and the elevator man in the Andrew Foster Hotel playing the New York stock market with mostly borrowed Monopoly money was one more proof that most people were fools.
The stock market was a house of cards about to collapse, and he got out early. And he took with him his friend Andrew Foster. So that when Black Tuesday struck, and people were literally jumping out of hotel-room windows, both the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation and Foster Hotels, Inc., remained solvent.
Of course, the Depression which followed the crash affected both corporations. Business was down. But retrenchment with cash in the bank is quite a different matter from retrenchment with a heavy debt service. Other shipping companies and hotels and hotel chains went into receivership and onto the auctioneer’s block, which gave both Ezekiel Pickering and Andrew Foster the opportunity to buy desirable properties, ships and hotels, at a fraction of their real value.
There never had been any doubt in Ezekiel’s mind that the domestic and international economies would in time recover. In fact, he agreed with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 inaugural declaration that the nation had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” and he said so publicly. Thus, when a suitable piece of real estate went on the auction block, he put his money where his mouth was and bought it.
The Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building was both a structural and an architectural marvel. It was designed not only to remain standing after what the engineers called a “hundred-year earthquake,” but to reflect the dominant position of the corporation in Pacific Ocean shipping.
An oil portrait of Ezekiel Pickering, completed after his death, was hanging in the office of the current Chairman of the Board. It showed him standing with his hand resting on a five-foot globe of the earth. The globe in turn rested in a mahogany gimbal. There were the traditional four gold stripes of a ship’s master around his jacket cuff, and a uniform cap with the gold-embroidered P&FE insignia was tucked under his arm.
His lips were curled in a small smile. In his widow’s view, that smile caught her late husband’s steely determination. But Fleming Pickering had a somewhat different take on it: while the artist had indeed captured a familiar smile of his father, based on Fleming’s own personal experience with it, that smile meant, Fuck you. I was right and you were wrong; now suffer the cost of your stupidity.
He had once told this to his wife, Patricia, and it had made her absolutely furious. But when he had told the same thing to old Andrew Foster, the hotelman had laughingly agreed.
It was a quarter past two on a Friday afternoon, and Fleming Pickering was alone in his office. There was a glass of Old Grouse Scotch whiskey in his hand. He drank his Scotch with just a dash of water and one ice cube. His father had taught him that, too. Good whiskey has a distinct taste; it is stupidity to chill it with ice to the point where that taste is smothered.
While there was always whiskey available in the office—kept in a handsomely carved teak cabinet removed from the Master’s cabin of the Pacific Messenger when she was retired from service and sent to the ship breakers—Fleming Pickering almost never drank alone. But the glass in his hand was the third today, and he was about to pour a fourth, when a light illuminated on one of the three telephones on the huge mahogany desk.
Since Pearl Harbor, Pacific & Far Eastern had lost nine of its fleet, eight to Japanese submarines and one, the tanker Pacific Virtue, at Pearl. It had been caught by Japanese bombers while it was unloading aviation gasoline. Three other P&FE ships were now overdue. Fleming Pickering thought it reasonable to presume that at least one of them would never make port.
He knew every officer on every crew, as well as a good many of the seamen, the black gang, and the stewards. He was not ashamed to have taken a couple of drinks.
Pickering reached over and picked up the handset of the telephone.
“Yes?”
“A Captain Haughton for you,” said Mrs. Helen Florian, his secretary, adding: “A Navy captain.”
I know what this sonofabitch is going to say, Pickering thought, as he punched the button that would put him on the line. “I’m afraid I have some bad news to report, Mr. Pickering.”
“This is Fleming Pickering,” he said to the telephone.
“Good afternoon, Sir. I’m Captain Haughton, of the Secretary’s staff.”
“How may I help you, Captain?”
“Sir, I’m calling for Secretary Knox. The Secretary is in San Francisco and wonders if you could spare him an hour or so of your time.”
Well, no news is good news, I suppose.
“What does he want?”
I know goddamn well what he wants. He wants my ships. He’s a tenacious bastard, I’ll say that for him.
“I’m afraid the Secretary didn’t confide that to me, Sir,” Captain Haughton said. “At the moment, the Secretary is on the Navy Station at Treasure Island. From there he’s going to the Alameda Naval Air Station to board his aircraft. Whichever would be most convenient for you, Sir.”
“No,” Fleming Pickering said.
“Excuse me, Sir?”
Obviously, Pickering thought, Captain Haughton, wrapped in the prestige of the Secretary of the Navy, is not used to hearing “no” when he asks for something.
“I said no. I’m afraid I don’t have the time to go to either Treasure Island or Alameda.”
“We’d be happy to send a car for you, Sir.”
“I have a car. What I don’t have is time. I can’t leave my office. But you can tell Mr. Knox that I will be in the office for the next several hours.”
“Mr. Pickering, you do understand that the Secretary is on a very tight schedule himself,” Captain Haughton said, and then added something he instantly regretted. “Sir, we’re talking about the Secretary of the Navy.”
“I know who he is. That’s why I’m willing to see him if he wants to come here. But you might save his time and mine, Captain, if you were to tell him that I have not changed my mind, and I will fight any attempt by the Navy to take over my ships.”
“Yes, Sir,” Captain Haughton said. “I will relay that to the Secretary. Good afternoon, Sir.”
Pickering put the handset back in its cradle.
If I wasn’t on my third drink, would I have been less difficult? Well, fuck him! I told him in plain English that if the Navy tries to seize my ships, I’ll take it to the Supreme Court. He should have listened to me.
He stood up from behind his desk, walked to the liquor cabinet, and made himself another Old Grouse and water. Then he walked to an eight-by-twelve-foot map of the world that hung on an interior wall. Behind it was a sheet of light steel. Models of the ships of the P&FE fleet, each containing a small magnet, were placed on it so as to show their current positions.
After he checked the last known positions of the Pacific Endeavor, the Pacific Volition, and the Pacific Venture, he mentally plotted their probable courses. Then he wondered—for what might have been the seven hundredth time—whether it was an exercise in futility, whether he should move the three models down to the lower left-hand corner of the map to join the models of the P&FE ships he knew for sure were lost.
Almost exactly an hour later, the bulb on one of his telephones lit up. When he picked it up, Mrs. Florian said, “Mr. Frank Knox is here, Mr. Pickering. He says you expect him.”
Well, I’ll be goddamned. He really is a tenacious sonofabitch!
“Please show Mr. Knox in,” Fleming Pickering said. He opened the upper right drawer of his desk, intending to put his Old Grouse and water out of sight.
Then he changed his mind. As the door opened, he stood up, holding the glass in his hand. The Hon. Frank Knox walked in, trailed by a slim, sharp-featured, intelligent-looking Navy officer with golden scrambled eggs on the brim of his uniform cap. He had to be Captain Haughton.
(Two)
Before speaking, the Hon. Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, stared for a moment at Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping. There was no expression on his face, but Pickering saw that his Old Grouse and water had not gone unnoticed.
Christ, he’ll think I’m a boozer; I was half in the bag the last time, too.
“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” Knox said. “I know you’re a busy man.”
“I have three overdue ships,” Pickering replied. “It’s the reason I didn’t come to meet you. I didn’t want to get far from a telephone.”
Knox nodded, as if he understood.
“Mr. Pickering, may I present Captain David Haughton, my administrative officer?”
The two shook hands. Pickering said, “We spoke on the telephone.”
“I’d like to talk to Mr. Pickering alone, David, if you don’t mind,” Knox said.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Mrs. Florian,” Pickering said, “would you make the Captain comfortable? Start with a cup of coffee. Something stronger, if he’d like.”
“Coffee will be fine,” Haughton said, as he followed Mrs. Florian out of the office.
“May I offer you something?” Pickering asked.
“That looks good,” Knox said, nodding at Pickering’s glass. “Dick Fowler told me you had cornered the Scotch market.”
Is he indulging me? Or does he really want a drink?
“It’s Old Grouse,” Pickering said, as he walked to the liquor cabinet to make Knox a drink. “And I’m glad you’ll have one. I’m a little uneasy violating my own rule about drinking, especially alone, during office hours.”
Knox ignored that. He waited until Pickering had handed him the glass, then he nodded his thanks and said, “Haughton doesn’t like you.”
“I’m sorry. I suppose I was a little abrupt on the telephone.”
“He doesn’t think you hold the Secretary of the Navy in what he considers to be the proper degree of awe.”
“I meant no disrespect,” Pickering said.
“But you aren’t awed,” Knox insisted. “And that’s what I find attractive.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There was a movie—or was it a book?—about one of those people who runs a a motion-picture studio. He was surrounded by a staff whose primary function was to say ‘Right, J.B.,’ or ‘You’re absolutely right, J.B.,’ whenever the great man paused for breath. After our interesting encounter in Dick Fowler’s apartment, when I calmed down a little, I realized that sort of thing was happening to me.”
“I don’t think I quite follow you,” Pickering said.
“This is good stuff,” Knox said, looking down at his glass.
“I’ll give you a case to take with you,” Pickering said. “I have a room full of it downstairs.”
“Because I’m the Secretary of the Navy?”
“Because I would like to make amends for my behavior in Fowler’s apartment. I had no right to say what I said.”
“The important thing, I realized, was that you said it,” Knox said. “And you might have been feeling good, but you weren’t drunk. I think you would have said what you said if you hadn’t been near a bottle.”
“Probably,” Pickering said. “That doesn’t excuse it, of course; but, as my wife frequently points out, when silence is called for, I too often say exactly the wrong thing.”
“Are you withdrawing what you said?” Knox asked evenly.
“I’m apologizing for saying it,” Pickering said. “I had no right to do so, and I’m sure that I embarrassed Richardson Fowler.”
“But you believe what you said, right?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”
“You had me worried there for a moment,” Knox said. “I was afraid I had misjudged you.”
“It may be the Scotch, but I have no idea what we’re talking about,” Pickering said.
Knox chuckled.
“We’re talking about you coming to work for me.”
My God, he’s serious!
“Doing what?”
“Let me explain the problem, and then you tell me if you think you could be helpful,” Knox said. “I mentioned a moment before that David Haughton doesn’t like you because you’re not sufficiently awed by the Secretary of the Navy. That attitude—not only on Dave Haughton’s part, but on the part of practically everybody else—keeps me from hearing what I should be hearing.”
“You mean what’s wrong with the Navy?”
“Precisely. Hell, I can’t blame Haughton. From the moment he entered Annapolis, he’s been taught as an article of faith that the Secretary of the Navy is two steps removed from God. The President sits at the right hand of God, and at his feet the Secretary of the Navy.”
“I suppose that’s so,” Pickering said, chuckling.
“To Haughton’s way of thinking, and to others like him, the Secretary of the Navy controls the very fate of the Navy. That being so, the information that is presented to him has to be carefully processed. And above all, the Navy must appear in the best possible light.”
“I think I understand,” Pickering said. “And I can see where that might be a problem.”
Knox removed his pince-nez, took a handkerchief from the sleeve of his heavy woolen suit—now that he noticed it, Pickering was sure the suit was English—and polished the lenses. He put them back on his nose, stuffed the handkerchief back up his jacket cuff, and looked directly at Pickering.
“That might be an overstatement, but it’s close,” he said. “And to that problem is added what I think of as the Navy’s institutional mind-set. From the very beginning, from the first Secretary of the Navy, the men in blue have been certain that the major cross they have to bear is that the man with the authority is a political appointee who really doesn’t know—is incapable of knowing—what the Navy is really all about.”
“Huh,” Pickering grunted.
“Their quite understandable desire is—and I suppose always has been—to attempt to manage the Secretary of the Navy. To see that he hears what they want him to hear, and that he does not hear—or at least is presented with in the best possible light—what they’d rather he didn’t hear at all.”
“One doesn’t think of the Navy as an institution,” Pickering said, “but of course that’s what it is.”
“On October 13, 1775, Congress voted to equip seven ships to support George Washington,” Knox said. “Less than a month later, on November 10, 1775, the Congress authorized the Marine Corps. And before that, there were states’ navies—Rhode Island’s in particular. In July 1775, Washington sent a frigate of the Rhode Island navy to Bermuda to get gunpowder for the Continental Army. In 167 years, a certain institutional mind-set is bound to occur.”
Pickering chuckled. There was something professorial in the way Knox had precisely recounted the origin of the Navy, and about the man himself, with his pince-nez and superbly tailored English suit. It was difficult to imagine him during the Spanish-American War, a Rough Rider sergeant charging up Kettle Hill with Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry.
As it is difficult for me to accept that I once actually fixed a bayonet onto my ’03 Springfield, and that when the whistle blew, I went over the top and into no-man’s-land in Belleau Wood.
“They had an interesting tradition, early on,” Pickering said. “Privateers. I don’t suppose I could talk you out of a Letter of Marque, could I?”
Knox looked at him with annoyance, and then smiled. “You really think there’s a place in this war for a pirate?”
“A pirate is an outlaw,” Pickering said. “A privateer was authorized by his government—and our government issued a hell of a lot of Letters of Marque—to prey on the enemy’s shipping. There’s a substantial difference.”
“You sound as if you’re serious.”
“Maybe I am,” Pickering said.
Knox looked at him for a moment, his demeanor making it clear he was not amused that Pickering was proposing, even half-jokingly, an absurd idea. Then he went on, “I understand why you felt you couldn’t work for Bill Donovan, but I think you’ll have to grant that he has the right idea.”
That was pretty stupid of me, Pickering thought. He’s going to think I’m a fool or a drunk. Or both.
“Excuse me? What idea?”
“The country will be better off—if the Army and the Navy let him get away with it, which is open to some doubt—if, that is to say, intelligence from all sources can be filtered through Donovan’s twelve disciples…and if they will use it as the basis for recommending to the President action that is in the best interests of the United States, as opposed to action recommended on the basis of the parochial mind-set of the Army or Navy.”
“I agree,” Pickering said. “I’m a little surprised—maybe ‘disturbed’ is the word—to hear you doubt the Army and Navy will ‘let him get away with it.’”
“I try to see things as they are,” Knox said. “And I’m fully aware that in addition to being at war with the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese, the Army and Navy are at war with each other.”
Pickering chuckled again.
“I laugh, too,” Knox said. “Even knowing that it’s not funny.”
“Why do I think that the Navy is having a hard time managing you?” Pickering said.
“Well, they’re trying,” Knox said. “And the odds would seem to be in their favor. Franklin Roosevelt is partial to the Navy. He was once an Undersecretary, for one thing. For another, he has a lamentable habit of calling in Ernie King—”
“Admiral King?” Pickering interrupted.
Knox nodded. “King replaced Admiral Stark as Chief of Naval Operations on December 31. Stark was a good man, but after Pearl Harbor he had to go. Anyway, Roosevelt has already started giving Admiral King marching orders without asking or telling me about it. And he’s about to throw Admiral Bill Leahy into the equation.”
“That you’ll have to explain,” Pickering said.
“Leahy—and understand, Pickering, that I admire all the people I’m talking about—is functioning as sort of chief of military staff to Roosevelt, a position that does not exist in the law. They’re about to organize a committee, comprised of the Chief of Staff of the Army, the head of the Army Air Corps, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. They’re going to call it the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or something like that. And Leahy will preside over that. Without any legal authority to do so, except a verbal one from Roosevelt.”
“Huh,” Pickering snorted, and added, “You seem to be outnumbered, Mr. Secretary. But I don’t see what any of this could possibly have to do with me.”
“My responsibility to the President, as I see it, is to present him with the most accurate picture that I can of the Navy’s strengths…and, more importantly, its weaknesses. His decisions have to be based on the uncolored facts, not facts seen through parochial, rose-colored glasses. I cannot, in other words, let myself be managed by Ernie King, or Bill Leahy, or the Association of Annapolis Graduates.”
Knox looked at Pickering, as if waiting for his reaction. When there was none, he went on, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I need some—more than that, several—people like Bill Donovan’s disciples.”
“And that’s where I come in? As one of them?”
Knox nodded. “Interested?”
“I don’t know what you’re really asking of me.”
“I want you to be my eyes and ears in the Pacific,” Knox said. “You know as much about maritime affairs in the Pacific as anyone I know, including all of my admirals.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Pickering said.
“I’m not talking about Naval tactics, about which I am prepared to defer to the admirals, but about logistics, by which I mean tonnages and harbors and stevedoring and time/distance factors. I don’t want my admirals to bite off more than they can chew as they try to redeem themselves in the public—and their own—eye after Pearl Harbor. Logistics affects strategy, and advising the President on strategy is my business. I want the facts. I think you’re the man who can get them for me.”
“Yeah,” Pickering said thoughtfully. “I could do that, all right.”
“My original thought was to offer you an assistant secretaryship, but I don’t think that would work.”
Pickering looked at him curiously.
“You’d be political. Both the political appointees and the Navy would hate you and try to manage you. And they’d probably succeed. If you were in uniform, however, the political appointees would not see you as a threat. As a naval officer, as a captain on the staff of the Secretary of the Navy…”
“A Navy captain?”
“Yes.”
“How’s the Navy going to react to an instant captain?”
“We’re commissioning a lot of ‘instant captains.’ Civil engineers, doctors, lawyers, all sorts of professionals. Even a few people who are already entitled to be called ‘captain,’ like yourself.” Knox paused and smiled at Pickering. “Since you already know the front of the ship is the bow and the floor is the deck, you’ll be way ahead of most of them.”
Pickering chuckled.
“Does this interest you, Pickering?”
“You think I could do something worthwhile?”
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
“Then I’m at your service, Mr. Knox,” Pickering said.
Knox walked up to him and offered his hand. “I’d like to have you as soon as possible. When do you think…?”
“Tomorrow morning be all right?” Pickering replied.
Now it was Knox’s turn to chuckle.
“Things don’t move quite that quickly, even for the Secretary of the Navy,” he said. “Could you call Captain Haughton back in here, please?”
Pickering picked up one of the telephones.
“Would you ask Captain Haughton to come in here, please, Mrs. Florian?”
The slim Navy officer, his eyes wary, appeared a moment later.
“David, Mr. Pickering has kindly offered me a case of this excellent Scotch. Would you see that it gets on the plane?”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Secretary.”
“And before we get on the plane, I want you to find out who handles officer procurement out here. Then call them and tell them I want a suitable officer assigned to walk Mr.—Captain—Pickering through the processing. Make it clear to them that this is important to me. As soon as we can get him sworn in, Captain Pickering will be joining my staff.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Haughton said. He looked at Pickering, briefly but intently. He was obviously surprised at what he had just heard.
“And stay on top of it when we get back to Washington,” Knox ordered. “I don’t want the process delayed by bureaucratic niceties. Tell them they are to assume that if any waivers are required, I will approve them. And while I’m thinking about it, tell the Office of Naval Intelligence that while we’ll go through the normal security-clearance process with Captain Pickering, I have—based on my own knowledge of Captain Pickering, and on the unqualified recommendation of Senator Fowler—already granted him an interim top-secret clearance. Have that typed up. Make it official.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
Knox turned to Pickering. “That should get the ball rolling. Haughton will be in touch. Thank you, Pickering. Not only for the Scotch. And now I have to get out of here. They’re waiting for me at Alameda.”
“May I send someone for the Scotch, Captain Pickering?” Haughton asked.
“It won’t take a minute to get it. You can take it with you.”
“Whatever you say. I’ll get the driver.”
“It doesn’t weigh all that much,” Pickering said, without thinking. “I’ll get it.”
Haughton gave him a quick, dirty look.
Well, here you go, Fleming Pickering, not five minutes into your naval career, and you’re already pissing people off.
“Let’s get it now,” Knox said. “Before he has a chance to change his mind.”
Pickering led them to the storeroom on the ground floor that held the greater part of the whiskey removed from the sold Pacific passenger liners. He pulled a case of Old Grouse off a stack. When he started to carry it out, he saw that Haughton was uncomfortable, visibly unable to make up his mind whether he should volunteer to carry the case of whiskey himself—or to insist on it.
A sailor who had been leaning against the front fender of a 1941 Navy gray Chrysler quickly stood erect when he saw them coming out of the building. He opened the rear door, then quickly moved to take the case of whiskey from Pickering.
At least he knows what he’s doing, Pickering thought.
Knox nodded to Pickering and got in the car. Haughton, at first hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, offered his hand to Pickering.
“Welcome aboard, Captain,” he said.
“Thank you,” Pickering said. He did not like the feel of Haughton’s hand.
He watched the Chrysler move down Nob Hill, and then went back to his office.
He made himself another drink, and drank it looking out his window at San Francisco bay. Then he looked for a moment at his father’s picture. He wondered what the Old Man would have said: Hooray for you for enlisting! or, You damned fool! Then he sat on the edge of his desk and called his home.
“Hi!” he said, when Patricia’s cheerful voice came on the line.
“You’ve heard, haven’t you?” Patricia Pickering said.
“What?” he replied, only afterwards remembering that she was talking about the overdue Endeavor, Volition, and Venture. They had, shaming him, slipped from his immediate attention.
“What’s on your mind, Flem?” Patricia asked.
“Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, was just in to see me.”
“About the ships? Oh God, that sounds ominous!”
“He wants me to go into the Navy,” Pickering said.
There was a pause before Patricia replied, “If you had turned him down, you would have said ‘wanted.’”
“Yes, that’s right.”
He heard her inhale deeply; it was a moment before she spoke.
“When do you go? What are you going to do?”
“Soon. Work for him. He’s arranging for me to be commissioned as a captain.”
“Oh, goddamn him!”
“I suppose I should have discussed this with you,” Pickering said.
“Why should you start now, after all these years?” It was a failed attempt at lightness; a genuine bitterness came through.
“I’m sorry, Pat,” he said, meaning it.
“My father would say, ‘Never be sorry for doing something you want to do.’ And you do want to go, Flem, don’t you?”
“Yes. I suppose I do.”
“Don’t come home now. I’d say things I would later regret.”
“OK.”
“Give me an hour. Make it an hour and a half. Then come.”
He heard the click as she hung up.
(Three)
Building “F”
Anacostia Naval Air Station
Washington, D.C.
30 January 1942
First Lieutenant Charles E. Orfutt, aide-de-camp to Brigadier General D. G. McInerney, stepped inside McInerney’s office, closed the door quietly behind him, and waited until the General raised his eyes from the paperwork on his desk.
“Sergeant Galloway is outside, Sir.”
That the news did not please General McInerney was evident on his face. He shrugged, exhaled audibly, and said, “Give me two minutes, Charlie, and then send him in.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Orfutt said, and quietly left the office.
Precisely two minutes later, there was a polite knock at McInerney’s door.
“Come!”
Technical Sergeant Charles M. Galloway, USMC, in greens, marched into the office, stopped precisely eighteen inches from McInerney’s desk, and came to attention. Then, gazing twelve inches over McInerney’s head, he said, “Technical Sergeant Galloway reporting to the General as ordered, Sir.”
General McInerney pushed himself backward in his chair, locked his fingers together, and stared at Galloway for a full thirty seconds before he spoke.
“Look at me,” he said.
Oh, shit. Here it comes, Charley Galloway thought. He dropped his eyes to meet McInerney’s.
“Do you have any idea how much goddamned trouble you’ve caused?”
“Yes, Sir. I think so.”
“You don’t look especially penitent, Sergeant.”
“Sir, I’m sorry about the trouble I caused.”
“But you think it was really caused by a bunch of chickenshit swabbies, and in your heart of hearts you don’t think you did anything wrong, do you?”
The old bastard can read my mind.
Galloway’s face went pale, but he didn’t reply.
“You’re thinking that you were almost a Marine Corps legend, is that it? That you’d be remembered as the guy who fixed up a shot-up fighter with his own hands, flew it without orders onto the Saratoga, and then on to Wake, and died gloriously in a battle that will live forever in the memory of man?”
Again, Galloway’s face paled momentarily, but he didn’t say anything.
That’s not true. I wasn’t trying to be a fucking hero. All I was trying to do was get that Wildcat to Wake, where it was needed.
“What the hell were you thinking, Galloway? Can you at least tell me that?”
“I was thinking they needed that Wildcat on Wake, Sir.”
“Did it occur to you that in the shape that Wildcat was, you could have done some real damage, crashing it onto the deck of the Saratoga?”
“Sir, the aircraft was in good shape,” Galloway said.
“It had been surveyed, for Christ’s sake, by skilled BUAIR engineering personnel and declared a total loss.” He was referring to the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics.
“Sir, the aircraft was OK,” Galloway insisted doggedly. “Sir, I made the landing.”
General McInerney believed everything Galloway was telling him. He also believed that if he were a younger man, given the same circumstances, he would—he hoped—have done precisely what Galloway had done. That meant doing what you could to help your squadron mates, even if that meant putting your ass in a potentially lethal crack. It had taken a large set of balls to take off the way Galloway had. If he hadn’t found Sara, he would have been shark food.
The general also found it hard to fault a young man who, fully aware of what he was going to find when he got there, had ridden—OK, flown—toward the sound of the guns. Purposely sailed, to put it poetically, into harm’s way.
And he also believed that Galloway had actually come very close to becoming a Marine Corps legend. Professionally—as opposed to parochially, as a Marine—General McInerney believed that it had been a mistake to recall Task Force 14 before, at the very least, it had flown its aircraft off to reinforce the Wake Island garrison.
That move came as the result of a change of command. Things almost always got fucked up during a change of command, at least initially. How much Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the former Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, was responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor was open to debate. But since he was CINCPAC, he was responsible for whatever happened to the ships of his command. And after the Japanese had wiped out Battleship Row, he had to go.
McInerney privately believed—from his admittedly parochial viewpoint as an aviator—that the loss of most of the battleship fleet was probably a blessing in disguise. There were two schools in the upper echelons of the Navy, the Battleship Admirals and the Carrier Admirals. There was no way that the Battleship Admirals could any longer maintain that their dreadnoughts were impregnable to airplanes; most of their battleships were on the bottom at Pearl.
Conversely, the Carrier Admirals could now argue that battleships were vulnerable to carrier-borne aircraft, using the same carnage on Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor as proof of their argument. That just might give command of the naval war in the Pacific to the Carrier Admirals.
McInerney knew that it wouldn’t be an all-out victory for the Carrier Admirals over the Battleship Admirals. The battleships that could be repaired would be repaired and sent into action; those still under construction would be completed. But if it came to choosing between a new battleship and a new carrier, the Navy would get a new carrier. And the really senior Navy brass would no longer be able to push Carrier Admirals subtly aside in favor of Battleship Admirals.
No aircraft carriers had been sunk at Pearl. It might have been just dumb luck that they were all at sea, but the point was that none of them had been sunk. And since there were no longer sufficient battleships to do it, it would be the aircraft carriers that would have to carry the battle to the enemy. And when the discussions were held about how to take the battle to the enemy, the opinions of the Carrier Admirals would carry much more weight than they had on December 6, 1941.
Admiral Husband E. Kimmel had to go, and he knew it, and so did everybody else in CINCPAC Headquarters. From 1100 on December 7, Kimmel had had to consider himself only the caretaker of the Pacific Fleet, holding the authority of CINCPAC only until his replacement could get to Hawaii. As it actually turned out, he wasn’t even given that. He was relieved, and an interim commander appointed, while Admiral King and the rest of the brass in Washington made up their minds who would replace him.
They had settled on Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. McInerney personally knew Nimitz slightly, and liked him. Professionally, he knew him better and admired him. But Nimitz hadn’t even been chosen to be CINCPAC when the decision had been made to send three carrier groups to sea, two to make diversionary strikes, and the third, Task Force 14, to reinforce Wake.
The decision to recall it had come after the humiliated Kimmel had been relieved, and before Nimitz could get to Hawaii and raise his flag as CINCPAC.
McInerney believed the recall order did not take into consideration what a bloody nose the Americans on Wake had given the Japanese with the pitifully few men, weapons, and aircraft at their disposal. Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the overall commander on Wake, and the Marines under Majors Devereux and Putnam, had practically worked miracles with what they had.
The decision to recall Task Force 14 had obviously been made because it was not wise to risk Sara and the three cruisers. McInerney was willing to admit that probably made sense, given the overall strength of the battered Pacific Fleet; but there was no reason for not making a greater effort to reinforce Wake.
Another twelve hours’ steaming would have put them within easy range to fly VFM-221’s F2A-3 Buffalo fighters (and Galloway’s lone F4F-4 Wildcat) off Sara onto Wake. It seemed likely to McInerney that risking the Tangier, with her Marine Defense Battalion and all that ammunition aboard, by sending her onto Wake would have been justified. Tangier could probably have been given air cover by VFM-221 and, for a while at least, as Sara steamed in the opposite direction, by Navy fighters aboard Sara.
Instead, Tangier had turned around with the others and gone back to Pearl Harbor…and at the moment she turned, she was almost at the point where the carriers could have launched aircraft to protect her.
McInerney was not willing to go so far as to assert that the presence of the additional aircraft (he was painfully aware of the inadequacies of the Buffalo) and the reinforcement Defense Battalion would have kept the Japanese from taking Wake, but there was no doubt in his mind that the planes and the men—and, more important, the five-inch shells—would have made it a very costly operation for them.
If that had happened, and if T/Sgt. Charley Galloway had managed to get his Wildcat onto Wake and into the battle, he would have become a Marine Corps legend.
But it hadn’t happened. Sara and the rest of Task Force 14 had returned to Pearl with Galloway and his F4F-4 aboard.
There was a good deal of frustration aboard Sara when that happened. McInerney had learned that a number of senior officers had actually recommended to the Task Force Commander that he ignore the recall order from Pearl and go on with the original mission. In the end, of course, they had obeyed their orders.
Meanwhile, McInerney guessed—very sure he was close to the truth—that some chickenshit sonofabitch, probably a swabbie, had pointed out that what that damned Marine flying sergeant had done was in clear violation of any number of regulations.
Since that sort of thing couldn’t be tolerated, charges were drawn up. And since people were looking for something, or someone, on whom to vent their frustration, Galloway had wound up being charged with everything but unlawful carnal knowledge.
General court-martial charges had actually been drawn up against him. But when it came to convening the court, they had found out that general court-martial authority was not vested in CINCPAC, but in the Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, back in San Diego, because VFM-211 was under its command.
So they had put T/Sgt. Galloway under arrest, on a transport bound for San Diego. And they’d air-mailed all the charges and specifications to the Commanding General, 2nd Marine Air Wing, “for appropriate action.”
The Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Air Wing, realizing a hot potato had dropped in his lap, had quickly tossed it upstairs and into the lap of Major General D. G. McInerney, at Headquarters, USMC.
A court-martial was now out of the question, as a practical matter. It would be impossible to gather the witnesses necessary for a successful prosecution in Washington. They were all over the Pacific. And some of them were dead. There was, besides, the question of the press. It would look to the press—as it looked to McInerney—as though the Marine Corps was about to try to punish somebody for trying to fight for his country.
“But we have to do something, Mac,” the Major General Commandant had said when McInerney reluctantly brought the matter to his attention. “Even Ernie King has heard about your Sergeant Galloway. Use your best judgment; I’ll back you up, whatever you decide.”
McInerney knew what would satisfy the Navy, short of a court-martial: a letter saying that Galloway had been relieved of flying duties and assigned elsewhere.
“I’m really furious with you, Galloway, about this,” McInerney said. “You’ve cost me a fine fighter pilot and what I’m sure would have been a superior squadron commander.”
“Sir?”
“You! You dumb sonofabitch!” McInerney said, with a fury that started out as an act, but became genuine as he realized that he was speaking the truth.
“I’m sorry, Sir, I don’t understand.”
“If you could have restrained your Alan Ladd-Errol Flynn-Ronald Reagan movie-star heroics for a couple of weeks, there would have been bars on your collar points and a squadron to command. You could more than likely have done some real damage to the enemy, a lot more than you could have caused even if you had managed to get that jury-rigged wreck to Wake. And probably taught some of these kids things that just might have kept them alive.”
“I never even thought about a commission,” Galloway replied, so surprised, McInerney noticed, that he did not append “Sir” to his reply.
“That’s your goddamn trouble! You don’t think!”
“Yes, Sir.”
“The Corps spent a lot of time and money training you, Galloway, and now that’s all going to be wasted.”
“Sir?”
“It will be a cold day in hell, Galloway, before you get in a cockpit again.”
“Yes, Sir,” Galloway said.
McInerney saw in Galloway’s eyes that that had gotten to him. The worst punishment that could be meted out to someone like Galloway was to take flying, any kind of flying, but especially flying a fighter plane, away from him.
I wonder why I said that? I don’t mean it. For a number of reasons, including both that the Corps needs pilots like Galloway, and that I have no intention of punishing him for doing something I would have done myself.
“It has not been decided whether to proceed with your court-martial, Galloway. Until that decision has been made, you will report to MAG-11 at Quantico. You will work in maintenance. But you will not get in the cockpit of a Texan, or any other aircraft, to so much as taxi it down a taxiway.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
“That’s all, Sergeant. You may go.”
“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” T/Sgt. Charley Galloway said. He did an about-face and marched out of General McInerney’s office.
Lieutenant Orfutt came into General McInerney’s office a moment later.
“Have a memo typed up to General Holcomb,” McInerney said, “saying that I have temporarily assigned Sergeant Galloway to Quantico for duty as an aircraft maintenance supervisor. And then do a letter to CINCPAC saying that appropriate action in the case of Sergeant Galloway is being implemented.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Orfutt said. “Damned shame to lose his experience.”
“You’re not listening carefully, again, Charlie,” McInerney said. “The operative word is temporarily.”
“Oh,” Orfutt said, and smiled. “Yes, Sir.”
“And I said something in the heat of anger that might make some sense. Get a teletype out to the 1st and 2nd Aircraft wings, telling them to review the records of the Naval Aviation Pilots and submit to me within seven days a list of those they can recommend for commissions. Put in there somewhere that the lack of a college degree is not to be considered disqualifying.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
“Is there anything else, Charlie?”
“Sir, you’re having lunch at the Army-Navy Club with Admiral Ward.”
“Oh, Christ! Can I get out of it?”
“This would be the third time you’ve canceled, Sir.”
McInerney looked at his watch.
“Order up the car.”
“I’ve done that, Sir. It’s outside.”
“Sometimes you’re just too goddamn efficient, Charlie. With a little bit of luck, maybe it would have had an accident on the way here from the motor pool.”
“Sorry, Sir,” Orfutt said, and went to the clothes tree and took General McInerney’s overcoat from it and held it up for him.
Fifteen minutes later, as the Marine-green 1941 Ford was moving down Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, General McInerney suddenly sat up. He had been glancing casually out the side window, but now he stared intently, then turned and stared out the back.
“Stop the car!” he ordered.
“Sir?” the driver, a young corporal, asked, confused.
“That was English, son,” McInerney snapped. “Pull to the curb and stop!”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” the Corporal replied, and complied with his orders.
“There’s a Navy officer coming up behind us on the sidewalk. Intercept him and tell him I would be grateful for a moment of his time,” McInerney said. Then he slumped low in the seat.
The driver got quickly out of the car, found the Navy officer, and relayed General McInerney’s desires to him. He walked just behind him to the car, then quickly stepped ahead of him to pull the door open.
The Navy officer, a captain, saluted.
“Good afternoon, General,” he said.
“Get in,” General McInerney ordered.
“Aye, aye, Sir,” the Captain said.
The Captain complied with his orders.
General McInerney examined him carefully.
“‘Fuck the Navy!’ Isn’t that what I remember you saying, Captain?”
“Yes, Sir, I seem to recall having said something along those lines.”
“And how long now have you been wearing Navy blue?”
“Three days, Sir. How do I look?”
“If people didn’t know any better, they’d think you were a Navy captain. The look of confusion in your eyes, for example.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“I’ve got a lunch date I can’t get out of,” General McInerney said. “But I can give you a ride. Where are you headed?”
“Just down the block, Sir.”
“To the hotel your father-in-law owns?”
“Actually, General, to the White House. Secretary Knox wants me to meet the President. I’ve been invited to lunch.”
“Oh, Flem, you sonofabitch! Why am I not surprised?”
(Four)
The White House
Washington, D.C.
30 January 1942
“My name is Pickering,” Fleming Pickering said to the civilian guard at the White House gate. The civilian had come out of a small, presumably heated guardhouse at his approach. The two soldiers on guard, their ears and noses reddened by the cold, apparently were required to stay outside and freeze.
“Let me see your identification,” the guard said curtly, even rudely.
Fleming produced his new Navy identification card. The guard examined it carefully, comparing the photograph on it to Pickering’s face.
“Wait here,” the guard said, and went back into the guardhouse. Pickering saw him pick up a telephone and speak with someone. He did not come back out of the guardhouse.
A minute later, a Marine sergeant in greens came down the driveway. He saluted.
“Would you come with me, please, Captain Pickering?” he said politely, crisply.
Pickering marched after him up the curving drive toward the White House. There was a crust of ice on the drive. It had been sanded, but the road was slippery.
The Marine led him to a side entrance, toward the building that had been built at the turn of the century to house the State, War, and Navy departments of the U.S. Government, and then up a rather ordinary staircase to the second floor.
Pickering found himself in a wide corridor. A clean-cut man in his early thirties sat at a small desk facing the wall, and two other men cut from the same bolt of cloth were standing nearby. Pickering was sure they were Secret Service agents.
“This is Captain Pickering,” the Marine sergeant said. The man at the desk nodded, glanced at his wristwatch, and made a notation in a small, wire-bound ledger.
“This way, please, Captain,” the Marine said, and led Pickering halfway down the corridor to a double door. He knocked. The door was opened by a very large, very black man in a starched white jacket.
“Captain Pickering,” the Marine sergeant said.
The black man opened the door fully. “Please come in, Sir,” he said. “The President’s expecting you.”
This was, Pickering realized, the President’s private suite, the Presidential apartments, or whatever it was called. He was surprised. He had expected to be fed in some sort of official dining room.
A tall, well-built, bespectacled man in the uniform of a Marine captain came out of an inner room. In the moment, Pickering recognized him as one of Roosevelt’s sons, he had no idea which one. The Captain said, “Good afternoon, Sir. Let me help you with your coat. Dad and Mr. Knox are right inside.”
Pickering handed him his uniform cap and then took off his topcoat and handed that over. Captain Roosevelt handed both to the steward, then motioned Pickering ahead of him through a door.
The President of the United States, in a wheelchair, rolled across the room to him, his hand extended. Pickering knew, of course, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been crippled by polio, but the wheelchair surprised him. He was almost never photographed sitting in it.
“We’ve been talking about you, Captain,” Roosevelt said as he shook Pickering’s hand in a very firm grip. “Have your ears been burning?”
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” Pickering said.
He heard his father-in-law Andrew Foster’s dry voice in his mind: “The sonofabitch is obviously a socialist, but giving the devil his due, he probably saved this country from going communist.”
“Naval officers are forbidden to drink on duty,” the President said, smiling warmly, “except, of course, when the Commander in Chief doesn’t want to drink alone.”
Another steward appeared at that moment with a glass of whiskey on a small silver tray.
“Thank you,” Pickering said, and raised the glass. “Your health, Sir,” he said, then took a sip. It was Scotch, good Scotch.
“That all right?” Roosevelt asked. “Frank said you’re a Scotch drinker.”
“This is fine, Sir.”
“He also told me that you’d much rather be wearing a uniform like Jimmy’s,” the President went on, “but that he’d convinced you you would be of greater use in the Navy.”
“I was a Marine, Sir,” Pickering said. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
Roosevelt laughed.
“Frank also told me to watch out for you—that if I let my guard down, you’d probably ask me for a Letter of Marque.”
Pickering glanced at Frank Knox, who smiled and shook his head.
“May I have one, Sir?” Pickering said.
Roosevelt laughed heartily.
“No, you may not,” he said. “I admire your spirit, Pickering, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to fight this war like everybody else—including me—the way someone tells you to.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Pickering said, smiling.
I am being charmed. I wonder why.
“Why don’t we go to the table and sit down?” Roosevelt said, gesturing toward a small table near windows overlooking the White House lawn. Pickering saw there were only four places set.
Stewards immediately began placing small plates of hors d’oeuvres before them.
Roosevelt began to talk about the British commandos. Pickering quickly saw that he was very impressed with them—as much for the public’s perception of them as for any bona fide military capability.
“When Britain was reeling across Europe from the Nazi Blitzkrieg,” Roosevelt announced, as if making a speech before a large audience, “when they were literally bloody and on their knees, and morale was completely collapsing, a few small commando operations, militarily insignificant in themselves, did wonders to restore civilian morale and faith in their government.”
“I had really never thought of it in that context,” Pickering said honestly. “But I can see your point.”
Roosevelt, Pickering was perfectly willing to grant, was a genius at understanding—and molding—public opinion.
“A very few brave and resourceful men can change the path of history, Pickering,” the President said sonorously. “And fortunately, right now we have two such men. You know Colonel Jim Doolittle, don’t you?”
“If you mean, Mr. President, the Jim Doolittle who used to be vice-president of Shell Oil, yes, Sir. I know him.”
“I thought you might,” the President said. “Two of a kind, you know, you two. Not thinking of the cut in pay that putting on a uniform meant, but rather rushing to answer the call of the trumpet.”
I really am being charmed, Fleming Pickering decided. He wants something from me. I wonder what. Not the damned ships again!
“Frank, have you told Captain Pickering what Jim Doolittle’s up to?”
“It’s top secret, Mr. President,” Secretary Knox replied.
“Well, I think we can trust Captain Pickering…. Captain Pickering, would you be offended if I called you by your Christian name?”
“Not at all, Mr. President.”
“Well, Frank, if Flem’s going to be working for you, he’ll find out soon enough anyway. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably, Mr. President.”
“Jim Doolittle, Flem, came to me with the idea that he can take B-25 Mitchell bombers off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.”
“Sir?” Pickering asked, not understanding.
“The Japanese Emperor is sitting in his palace in Tokyo, convinced that he’s absolutely safe from American bombing. Colonel Doolittle and his brave men are about to disabuse him of that notion,” Roosevelt said, cocking his cigarette holder almost vertically in his mouth as he smiled with pleasure.
“The idea, Pickering,” Secretary Knox said, “is that we will carry Doolittle on a carrier within striking distance of Tokyo; they will launch from the carrier, bomb Tokyo, and then fly on to China.”
“Fascinating,” Pickering said, and then blurted, “but can Doolittle do it? Can you fly airplanes that large from aircraft carriers?”
“Doolittle thinks so. They’re down in Florida now, in the Panhandle, learning how,” Knox said. “Yes, I think it can be done.”
“Christ, that’s good news!” Pickering said excitedly. “So far, all we’ve done is take a licking.”
“And there will be other reverses in the near future, I am very much afraid,” Roosevelt said.
“The Philippines, you mean?” Pickering asked.
“You don’t believe that Douglas MacArthur will be able to hold the Philippines?” Roosevelt asked. He was still smiling, but there was a hint of coldness in his voice.
Jesus Christ, my mouth has run away with me again!
“Mr. President, I don’t pretend to know anything about our forces in the Philippines, but I do know that they will require supplies. I do know something about shipping. I know that there are not enough bottoms to supply a large military force, and even if there were, there are not enough warships after Pearl Harbor to protect the sea lanes to the Philippines.”
“Aren’t you concerned, talking like that,” Roosevelt asked, carefully, “that someone who doesn’t know you might think you’re a defeatist?”
“If I have spoken out of turn, Mr. President…”
Roosevelt looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment before he spoke again.
“I said, a while ago, we have two brave and resourceful men,” he said. “Jimmy here is allied with the other one. And don’t tell me this is top secret, too, Frank. I know.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Knox replied.
“The commander of the Marine Guard at White Sulphur Springs a few years back,” Roosevelt said, “was a man named Evans Carlson. You happen to know him?”
“No, Sir.”
“Major Carlson is now out in San Diego, starting up a unit I think of as American Commandos. But I don’t want it to appear as if we’re slavishly copying our British cousins, so we’re calling them Raiders. All volunteers, highly trained, who will hit the Japanese and then run.”
“Sounds very interesting,” Pickering said.
I wonder how he’s going to move them around? It’s thirty, forty miles from the English coast to the French. Distances in the Pacific are measured in multiple hundreds, multiple thousands, of miles.
“Frank had the Navy yards convert some old four-stacker destroyers to high-speed transports,” Roosevelt said.
He’s reading my mind, Pickering thought.
“The idea, Flem,” Captain Roosevelt said, “is that by striking the Japanese where they don’t expect it, in addition to what damage we do there, we will force the Japanese to put forces they could use elsewhere to work guarding all of their islands.”
“I see,” Pickering said.
“And, Flem,” the President said passionately, “think of what it will do for morale! As you just said, all we’ve done so far in this war is take a licking and lick our wounds!”
“Yes, Sir. I understand.”
“Well, I’m sorry to tell you that my enthusiasm is not shared by either the Navy or the Marine Corps,” the President said.
“Now, Frank,” Secretary Knox said, “that’s not true.”
“They are dancing with Evans Carlson with all the enthusiasm of a fourteen-year-old in dancing school paired off with a fat girl,” Roosevelt said, and everyone laughed. “They have to do it, but they don’t have to like it.”
“Frank,” Secretary Knox said, “if you really think that’s the case, I’ll send Captain Pickering out there to see what needs straightening out.”
Roosevelt looked as if he had just heard a startlingly brilliant suggestion for the first time.
You fraudulent old sonofabitch, Pickering thought, that’s what this whole thing with your boy here for a private lunch is all about. Knox brought me here to let you know what he intended to do with me, and you’ll let him, providing I take care of this Major Evans Carlson. Tit for tat. I haven’t been here a week, and I’m already in politics.
“That might not be a bad idea, Frank,” Roosevelt said thoughtfully, and then added, “Now that I think about it, if you can spare Fleming, he’s probably just the right man for the job. You were a Marine, Flem, after all.”
“Yes, Sir, I was.”
“I’ll send him out there tomorrow, Mr. President,” Knox said.
“Good idea, Frank!”
When they left the White House, Knox waited until they were in his limousine and then said, “I have a Commander Kramer who has all the background material on Major Carlson, the Raiders, and their target. An island called Makin. I’ll have him bring it around to your hotel tomorrow. And then you get on the Monday-morning courier plane to San Diego. I’m not really sure how I feel about the whole idea…. I understand why people may be dragging their feet; they think it’s both a waste of time and materiel and an idea that may go away…. But now I know that it’s important to Roosevelt. Given that, it’s important to you and me that you go out there and light a fire under people.”
“I’m sympathetic to the notion that a victory, any kind of a victory, even a small one, is important right now.”
“And it will be even more important when the Philippines fall,” Knox said. “So it’s important, for a number of reasons, that you go out there right away. We can get you an office and a secretary when you come back.”