Miracles and Massacres

by Glenn Beck

  Iva opened the door, her dark hair still wet. Three officers and a master sergeant from the Army Counter Intelligence Corps stood on her front porch.

  Iva Toguri was under arrest.

  Tokyo

  July 4, 1946

  It was her birthday, but after spending the last eight months in prison, Iva Toguri was not in a celebratory mood. Showering at Tokyo’s Sugamo prison, where many Japanese war criminals were also being held, Iva felt sad and alone. She missed her husband, whom she was only allowed to see for twenty minutes a month. She missed Charles Cousens, who had been sent back to Australia, where he told military authorities that Iva was innocent of any wrongdoing. She missed her father and siblings, whom she’d not seen in five years. And, most of all, she grieved for her mother, who, unbeknownst to Iva until now, had died three years earlier in a Japanese-American internment camp.

  As Iva emerged from the shower stall, she stopped suddenly and screamed. She had been through a lot of surreal experiences in recent years, but this was the most bizarre of all. Peering through a window and into the foggy bathroom like they were viewing a circus act were sixteen well-dressed men.

  She did not know it, but they were all United States congressmen.

  Tokyo

  October 25, 1946

  Amid the popping of reporters’ flashbulbs and the shouting of questions, Iva Toguri ran through the lobby of Sugamo prison and into the arms of her smiling husband. After a year behind bars, Iva was being unconditionally released by the United States military due to lack of evidence.

  She took the bouquet of flowers that Phil had brought for her and smiled. It was a new beginning, a chance to put this nightmare behind her and return to her life in California.

  Or so she thought.

  Tokyo

  January 5, 1948

  Iva had cried for so long that her eyes had run dry. It was hard not to think of everything that had brought her to this point and wonder if it all would have been different had she not been so naïve.

  It had now been over a year since the U.S. State Department told her that she was in a line of ten thousand second-generation Americans stranded in Japan waiting for approval to return to America. Now she wondered if that was just another lie.

  Cynicism did not suit Iva well, but she’d come a long way since she’d accepted that interview with Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge three years earlier. She knew that if she’d been less naïve back then, she would probably be back at home in Los Angeles right now nursing her and Phil’s first child.

  Instead, she lay in her bed in Tokyo, her husband holding her tight as her body shook and heaved uncontrollably.

  Their baby had died that morning.

  Washington, D.C.

  May 25, 1948

  Thomas DeWolfe sat at his small desk, dictating a memo to the unluckiest secretary at the Department of Justice. She was the only assistant in the building still working this late at night and DeWolfe was, as usual, the only attorney.

  DeWolfe knew his bosses, especially Attorney General Tom Clark, did not want to hear what this memo had to say: Iva Toguri was innocent.

  That same conclusion had been reached almost two years earlier by lots of others, including the Counter Intelligence Corps’s legal section, its intelligence division, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, and the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Theron L. Caudle.

  After Toguri was released, the American press had gone crazy. Walter Winchell, the most powerful gossip columnist in America, waged a personal crusade against her. Furious that Iva was trying to return to the United States, Winchell labeled her a traitor in his syndicated columns, which were read by seven million Americans, as well as on his Sunday night radio broadcasts, heard by twenty million listeners. He wanted the government to re-arrest Iva and prosecute her for treason. At the very least, he wanted to make sure that Iva never set foot on American soil—unless, of course, it was in handcuffs.

  “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!” he began every radio show. It was great entertainment, delivered with the panache of the vaudevillian he once was. The information that followed it, however, like the “news” in his columns, was usually wrong.

  According to Winchell, the lawyers at the Justice Department who were blocking Iva Toguri’s re-arrest and prosecution were “emperor-lovers and friends of the Zaibatsu.” He also told his audience that Clark Lee had turned the original typewritten copy of Toguri’s eighteen-page confession over to FBI agents. In it, according to Winchell, she had named two witnesses against her, both of whom were available to testify if she was brought to trial.

  Thomas DeWolfe knew that almost everything in Winchell’s reporting on Iva was wrong: there were no “emperor-lovers” in the Justice Department; Iva’s “confession” was nothing more than Clark Lee’s notes from his interview—where she had unequivocally denied any wrongdoing; and the “two witnesses against her” were Charles Cousens and Ted Ince. DeWolfe knew these two men would actually confirm Iva’s innocence if they were called to testify. Cousens, in fact, had written to the Justice Department saying as much.

  The career federal prosecutor understood Washington well enough to know that a memo from him concluding that Iva Toguri should not be re-arrested would win him few friends in the Truman administration. But DeWolfe also knew that it was his job to tell his bosses the facts. It was their job to decide whether to listen to them.

  “There is insufficient evidence to make out a prima facie case,” he dictated to his tired secretary. “Don’t forget that facie is f-a-c-i-e, and that last sentence should be in all capital letters.”

  “Thank you, Mr. DeWolfe.” Debbie had worked with him for a dozen years and not once had she ever called him “Tom.”

  “The government witnesses, almost to a man, will testify to facts which show that the subject was pro-American, wished to return to the United States and tried to do so prior to Pearl Harbor, attempted, again, unsuccessfully to return to the United States in 1942, and beamed to American troops only the introduction to innocuous musical recordings.”

  DeWolfe had no doubt that other female disc jockeys, other “Tokyo Roses,” had broadcast propaganda that was far from innocuous. Nor did he doubt why the American government was not interested in prosecuting any of them: The press had not appointed itself as judge, jury, and executioner of those women; Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge had not labeled those women as “Tokyo Rose”; and Walter Winchell had not publicly directed his wrath and vitriol toward those women.

  DeWolfe continued dictating: “The government’s evidence likewise will show that subject was a trusted and selected agent of the Allied prisoners of war, who selected her as the one they could trust not to sabotage their efforts against the success of the Japanese propaganda machine.”

  When it was complete, DeWolfe’s memo totaled approximately 2,500 words. Not one of them indicated that he had any doubt about Iva Toguri’s innocence.

  Washington, D.C.

  August 16, 1948

  The presidential election was only months away. President Truman, feeling pressure from the public over Tokyo Rose—pressure that was fueled almost daily by Walter Winchell—and sick of being labeled by the media as “soft on communism” and “soft on spies,” ordered Attorney General Tom Clark to make a case against Iva Toguri.

  Clark ordered that Toguri be arrested in Japan and brought to California to stand trial for treason. He appointed Thomas DeWolfe, the government’s best trial attorney, especially when it came to cases involving treason, as her prosecutor.

  San Francisco

  One year later: August 12, 1949

  Thomas DeWolfe was having trouble sleeping. In fact, he hadn’t slept well from the moment he gave his opening statement in United States v. Iva Toguri to the day he questioned the last of his forty-six witnesses—a period of five weeks.

  He tried to pass the insomnia off as simple nervousness about the trial, but deep dow
n he suspected it was something else: an uneasy conscience. DeWolfe knew he was a compartmentalizer, and he comforted himself in the belief that the decision to prosecute an innocent woman was not his to make. His only job was to follow orders and to give the Department of Justice his absolute best effort.

  In the past five weeks, that best effort had included ensuring an all-white jury through peremptory strikes of African and Asian Americans during jury selection. It had also included calling to the witness stand American GIs who remembered hearing a female disc jockey broadcasting Japanese propaganda, even though these witnesses had trouble remembering key details—like the dates of broadcasts, times of day, and the sounds of the voices they heard—that would help distinguish Iva from other announcers.

  Despite those weaknesses in his case, DeWolfe’s direct examination of two men from Radio Tokyo had gone exceedingly well. George Mitsushio, the American who’d renounced his citizenship, and his sidekick Kenkichi Oki had perjured themselves after being solicited by none other than Harry Brundidge, whom the Department of Justice had sent to Japan as an agent of the government to find and interview witnesses for the prosecution.

  DeWolfe knew that, four years after Brundidge had first interviewed Iva, he was still more interested in making a name for himself than in finding the truth. The yellow-journalist-turned-government-investigator had threatened former American citizens like Mitsushio and Oki with treason charges if they didn’t testify against Iva.

  As DeWolfe lay in bed, staring at the ceiling for the fifth straight hour, he tried to quell his uneasiness with the idea of putting witnesses on the stand who were very likely lying. Not your job, Thomas, he said to himself. These are the witnesses your bosses want you to call. It’s not your job to question their decisions.

  It’s your job to win.

  San Francisco

  August 14–17, 1949

  The day before Charles Cousens was scheduled to testify, Iva Toguri ran into his arms and cried tears of joy.

  Part of the reason Iva was so happy to see Cousens was that she knew he could rebut all the lies told by Mitsushio and Oki. The other part was that she had simply missed him. His confidence and determination, his talent for writing and comedy, and his interest in coaching and leading Iva in a secret mission against the Japanese had been important to her during the war.

  Several days later, on Cousens’s third day of testimony in Iva’s defense, she had something else to smile about. DeWolfe had asked him, “Did any other Japanese bring you food besides the defendant?”

  Cousens did not miss a beat. “The defendant was not Japanese,” he replied. “She was an American.”

  San Francisco

  September 7–15, 1949

  On the forty-sixth day of what had become the most expensive prosecution in American history, Iva Toguri raised her right hand and, with an American flag standing behind her, took the witness stand and swore to tell the truth.

  As she looked out at her husband, father, and siblings in the row behind the defense table, she knew they were worried about the decision she’d made to testify. But she didn’t share their fears. Iva understood what was at stake in this trial, but she was sure that if she took the stand and was honest, then the truth would prevail. This is America, she told herself. The system works.

  Over four days of direct examination Toguri described her entire life, from her childhood in California through her broadcasts at Radio Tokyo and her interview with Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge. At the end, her attorney, Wayne Collins, finally asked her, “Did you do anything whatsoever with intent to undermine or lower American or Allied military morale?”

  “Never,” she replied.

  “Did you do anything with intent to create nostalgia in the mind of Americans or Allied armed forces?”

  “Never.”

  “Did you do any act whatsoever with the intention of betraying the United States?”

  “Never.”

  “Did you at any time whatsoever commit treason against the United States?”

  There it was, the word that had haunted her since Clark Lee’s “Traitor’s Pay” article; the word that had been flung around recklessly by Walter Winchell and Harry Brundidge for the past two years: traitor.

  Iva’s anger and outrage were boiling inside her, but she kept her emotions in check, offering only the slightest glimpse of them by the forcefulness with which she replied to Collins’s last question.

  “Never.”

  San Francisco

  September 29, 1949

  Rising to her feet as the judge and jurors entered the courtroom, Iva stared down at her tan plaid skirt, the same unflattering, out-of-style one she’d ironed in her jail cell every night and worn to her trial every day.

  “Has the jury arrived at a verdict?” asked Michael Roche, the seventy-two-year-old federal judge who had issued jury instructions that were extremely detrimental to the defense. Roche had told the jurors that they were not to consider Iva’s giving of food and medicine when judging her intentions. They were also forbidden to consider her refusal, even in the face of constant intimidation from the secret police, to renounce her American citizenship.

  It was 6:04 P.M. on the fourth day of jury deliberations and it seemed that another full day and night was about to pass with no resolution in sight. No one in the courtroom expected that a verdict had been reached.

  The judge didn’t expect it. He had recently suggested to the jurors that they take a break for dinner.

  The spectators didn’t expect it. If a verdict had been likely at this hour, there would have been more than forty people in the largely empty courtroom.

  The press didn’t expect it. Only ten journalists were milling around the courtroom at this late hour.

  And Iva certainly didn’t expect it—though by this point she had pretty much lost all faith in her ability to predict events. She once thought that after the jurors heard the defense witnesses and her own testimony, an acquittal would come quickly. But her confidence had been shaken by the four days of jury deliberations. “If they go more than a day,” her attorney had told her, “it’s not a good sign.”

  In response to Judge Roche’s question of whether the jury had reached a verdict, John Mann, the pleasant bookkeeper acting as jury foreman, replied, “We have, Your Honor.”

  The court clerk took the verdict form from Mann. He passed it to the judge, who read it in silence, before returning it to the clerk, who broke the silence with a single word.

  “Guilty.”

  EPILOGUE

  Chicago, Illinois

  Forty years later: January 13, 1989

  The Toguri Mercantile shop on North Clark Street was closed for the evening. Iva sat at her small desk in the back room, reviewing the day’s receipts and filling out quarterly tax forms. For more than three decades, she had worked at the store her father founded. Now, at seventy-three years old, she was the store’s owner, manager, accountant, and primary salesperson.

  Most of the store’s customers had no idea that the petite shopkeeper had once been convicted of treason. Or that she had lost her American citizenship upon her conviction, had served more than six years in federal prison, and had then barely escaped deportation when her enemies tried to expel her from the country as an “undesirable alien” after her release. They certainly did not know that the government had destroyed her marriage by barring her husband from entering the country.

  These customers also did not know that John Mann, the jury foreman, had quickly come to regret the verdict he and two other holdouts had begrudgingly been persuaded by the other nine jurors to approve. They could not have known that Thomas DeWolfe, who had been instrumental in taking six years of Iva’s life, had taken his own just three years earlier.

  And they had no idea that the owner of the Toguri Mercantile shop had received a full, unconditional pardon from the president of the United States in 1977. In doing so, Gerald Ford had finally returned to Iva Toguri the one thing she had so defiantly clung t
o for so many years: her American citizenship.

  As Iva closed the account books, marking the end of another fourteen-hour workday, she glanced at the photograph on her desk of a distinguished-looking man with a confident, charming smile.

  And after all these years, she was still comforted by Charles Cousens.

  Seventeen years later: January 16, 2006

  Iva had tried to keep her emotions bottled up inside her during the trial. But now, at a solemn ceremony in downtown Chicago, the eighty-nine-year-old saw no reason to hold them back any longer.

  “Throughout an ordeal that has lasted decades,” declared a broad-shouldered, aging World War II veteran, who was more than a head taller than the ceremony’s guest of honor, “Iva Toguri has endured her fate with dignity, courage, and a deep faith in God and in the essential fairness of the American system.”

  As Iva wiped tears from her face, the veteran continued: “For her indomitable spirit, her love of country, and the example of courage she has given her fellow Americans, the World War II Veterans Committee proudly bestows the 2005 Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award on Iva Toguri.”

  During the same time that Iva was trying to cheer up American soldiers and sailors in the Pacific, Edward Herlihy had become so famous announcing newsreels that he had been called “The Voice of World War II.” After being the object of a media witch hunt, it was one of life’s great ironies that Iva was now about to accept an award named after an American journalist.

  As the veteran draped the medal around her neck, Iva thought of how much her reputation had changed in sixty years, but how little her patriotism and idealism had. She had regrets but no bitterness. She still loved America, despite what its press and government had done to her.

  Facing the standing crowd and its thunderous applause, she thought back to the first time she’d seen the malnourished Charles Cousens. She thought of the first lines she’d spoken into a microphone at Radio Tokyo. And, finally, she thought of her father’s first words to her when she’d returned to California to stand trial for treason.