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 Stat
es 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
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