Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  “At the time the North Koreans set foot on your ship, did you any longer have the power to resist?”

  “No, I did not,” the captain responded firmly.

  That issue—whether or not Bucher had the ability to fight back at the time he surrendered—was the central legal conundrum facing the court of inquiry. On its surface, “the power to resist” seemed like a convenient rhetorical yardstick for measuring whether a skipper had lived up to the don’t-give-up-the-ship ethos. As far as many naval officers were concerned, if Bucher could have fought back but didn’t, he was a coward, a disgrace to the service. But could the power to resist be quantified? If so, how? By number of fighting men? By number and type of weapons? By degree of courage and determination?

  At the moment Bucher gave it up, his ship was generally intact and most of his men unscathed. But he was encircled by six enemy gunboats—capable of shelling and torpedoing his vessel from a safe distance until it came apart at the seams—while two MiG fighters menaced from above. What were his chances, realistically, of breaking out of that tactical vise? If the answer was slim to none, did he have a moral responsibility to surrender without wasting his subordinates’ lives? Few would argue that a man with a derringer surrounded by six men with shotguns possesses, in any practical sense, the power to resist. Was there a point at which resistance regardless of the odds becomes an act not of bravery but of recklessness, even idiocy?

  Bucher wanted to keep testifying in spite of the Article 0730 notification. On day four of the court, he recounted his mind-bending first hours in North Korean custody. He described the fat general angrily calling him and his officers spies and saying they’d all be shot at sundown. He testified about demanding to be executed so his crew could go free. He told of Super C screaming at him to sign the pretyped “confession” and, when he refused, ordering one of his goons to count down from two minutes and blow his brains out.

  As he related that part of his story, the captain stood before an easel holding a large diagram of the Barn. He used a pointer to indicate the room in which the pistol was cocked near his ear.

  “It occurred to me that being shot at this point would be a blessing,” he told the admirals. “So I knelt there on the floor and during the entire two minutes . . .”

  He stopped, unable to continue. He sipped water from a yellow goblet. His hands trembled and his shoulders drooped. A microphone around his neck carried the sound of his labored breathing throughout the auditorium.

  “Would the commander like a recess at this time?” Newsome asked solicitously.

  “No, sir.” Bucher tried to go on but faltered again after a few words. “Sir, I would rather get this over with right now, if I may.” He wiped his forehead. Fighting for control, he stood there for long moments before trying to speak again.

  “Sir, during the entire two minutes that I was laying on the floor I repeated over”—another long pause, more sips—“merely the phrase ‘I love you, Rose,’ and thereby kept my mind off what was going to happen.”

  Sitting in the front row of the packed courtroom, his wife cupped a hand over her eyes.

  The captain began quietly to weep. A Navy doctor, assigned to observe him for signs of excessive stress, rushed to his side. The admirals turned away.

  Gathering himself, Bucher went on: “At the end of the two minutes the colonel asked me again, was I ready to sign, and I told him, ‘I will not sign.’ So the officer who was standing in front of me was ordered to move aside, presumably so that when I was shot, the bullet, if it would have passed through my head, would not have also hit this officer.”

  But the North Koreans were only playing him with an unloaded gun. When he refused to sign a second time, Super C ordered him beaten into unconsciousness.

  The skipper testified that as the night wore on, the communists kept upping the pressure, trying to break him quickly. He told of being taken to the dungeon and blacking out after seeing the gruesomely tortured stranger. He related the threat to shoot his men one by one, and his desperate attempt to drown himself in his water pail.

  When he finished his horrific testimony, the admirals seemed not to know how to react.

  “What was your objective in not eating?” Bergner asked awkwardly.

  White posed a question whose answer seemed painfully obvious: “Why didn’t you sleep?”

  Observing from the audience, Trevor Armbrister, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, felt a rush of conflicting emotions. “An aura of unreality pervaded the courtroom that afternoon,” he later wrote. “Listening to such questions, one felt, at first, a surge of anger and then, surprisingly, deep compassion for these five honorable, lonely men who had entered the shadows of Bucher’s despair and had not known what to say.”

  Mercifully, Bowen called a recess. Newsome put a gentle hand on Bucher’s shoulder. Harvey led the skipper out a side door and, as light rain fell, walked slowly around an athletic track with him.

  Though as potential witnesses Bucher’s men were barred from the hearing room, they soon found out about the Article 0730 warning. At one point on day four, Tim Harris darted through the front door and slipped the captain a handwritten note from the entire crew.

  “Dear Captain,” it read, “We’ve made it this far together and we’ll finish it together.” The note was signed, “Bucher’s Bastards.” The men’s plainspoken expression of loyalty and solidarity with their beleaguered leader was written up on the front page of the next day’s Washington Post.

  His sailors weren’t alone in their feelings for Bucher. His heartrending story resonated with many Americans. And as his grueling first days in the witness chair ended, an extraordinary public outcry arose.

  Newspaper commentators, members of Congress, and average citizens vociferously criticized the Navy for supposedly trying to blame the captain for errors made by higher echelons. Bucher was called a martyr and compared to Alfred Dreyfus, the French Army captain falsely accused of treason, and Lord Jim, the British seaman who redeems himself after a moment of weakness in Joseph Conrad’s eponymous novel. A Boston Globe cartoonist depicted Bucher lashed as if crucified to the prow of an antiquated sailing ship, labeled “U.S. Navy.” Many Americans rejected the Navy’s repeated assertions that the court of inquiry was necessary and routine, regarding it instead as an exercise in inquisitorial cruelty. Max Lerner, a New York columnist, characterized the Coronado courtroom as “Bucher’s Gethsemane,” a reference to the garden near Jerusalem where Jesus was betrayed.

  Bucher hadn’t deliberately tried to turn the tables on the Navy. While his dramatic testimony had been confrontational to some extent, he still considered himself a loyal officer and hoped one day to command another ship. But the captain strongly believed the Navy bore much of the responsibility for what had happened to the Pueblo, and many of his fellow citizens felt the same way. “The Navy Is on Trial, Not Bucher,” proclaimed the Christian Science Monitor, calling Newsome’s admonition of a possible court-martial an “appalling demonstration of inhumanity, ill-timing, pompousness, and poor taste.” The Los Angeles Times echoed that sentiment with a cartoon showing three admirals, bug-eyed with fear, standing in a wobbly rowboat while trying to fend off a floating mine labeled, “Bucher’s ‘Pueblo’ Testimony.” U.S. Representative Richard Ottinger, a New York Democrat, sent a letter to President Nixon’s newly appointed defense secretary, Melvin Laird, charging that the Navy’s Article 0730 warning was “a clear attempt to intimidate the Pueblo’s commander into withholding the full story of the intelligence ship’s failure.”

  More than 3,000 letters poured in to the Navy’s public information bureau at the Pentagon, many of them blisteringly critical. Other letters and telegrams went directly to Admiral Bowen, including one addressed to “Bowen and his pimps.” Bag after bag of angry mail arrived in Coronado:

  “How can you crucify that man, when all he did was try to save the lives of his crew?”


  “It’s an obvious frame-up.”

  “Hang the higher-ups, not Bucher.”

  Admiral Moorer found himself sucked into the cyclone of scorn, too. A man from Glen Rock, New Jersey, telephoned the chief of naval operations’ office and vented that “the Navy stinks . . . and Admiral Moorer is a horse’s ass and the Navy was torturing Commander Bucher and the man should not be made to suffer for the Navy’s mistakes.” In a letter to John Chafee, Nixon’s new secretary of the Navy, the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, described the court of inquiry as “cruelty of the most intolerable kind.”

  “I protest for thousands of Americans,” Richard C. Lee went on. “I would hope that this harassment would be halted before it goes any further and kills this man. He has gone through too much to be treated in this fashion by navy brass who apparently have no concern except to fix the blame, somehow, on someone other than the establishment.” Another Connecticut resident asked the Navy’s chief chaplain in a telegram, “What do they expect of a wounded man with no guns responsible for 82 men? Who is the admiral responsible for this fiasco?”

  At the same time, Bucher and his wife received hundreds of supportive letters and wires.

  “We are with you, Commander,” someone scrawled on a pro-Bucher editorial torn from their local newspaper. Declared another fan: “You’re a hero to us here in Boston, Cmdr. Bucher, and you always will be.” The six members of an Orange, Connecticut, family—Russell, Nancy, Roger, Marjorie, Eileen, and Bonnie Ziontz—opened their letter with a hearty, “Welcome home!”

  “We want you to know,” the Ziontzes continued, “that we consider you a very brave and humane man. The kind our country needs a lot more of. To do what you have done—save the lives of all your captured crew and endured the hell you have been through—you must be made of pure hero material.”

  As hundreds of U.S. soldiers perished every month in the futile meat grinder of Vietnam, many Americans applauded Bucher’s decision to avoid a potential massacre of his crew. Fighting back against the North Korean gunboats, wrote Miami Herald columnist Jack Kofoed, “made as much sense as a circus midget trying to slug Cassius Clay,” the champion heavyweight boxer who had renamed himself Muhammad Ali. “To die for no reason except to uphold 0730 of Naval regulations,” Kofoed added, “makes no sense.” Orien Fifer, a Phoenix Gazette columnist, concurred: “If he’d resisted with his two machineguns or pistols, he and his entire crew would have been blown to Kingdom Come.”

  Through no fault of his own, Bucher was fast becoming America’s newest antiestablishment hero, a freethinking rebel who refused to sacrifice his men merely to uphold outmoded martial values. That portrayal, of course, was an almost comical distortion of the skipper’s true self: an aggressive, salute-snapping career officer thoroughly steeped in Navy convention. Fans in the media nevertheless embraced him as a paragon of conscience and humaneness, a new kind of military leader who strove to preserve life rather than destroy it. “In a time when ancient rituals of ‘national honor’ could trigger a nuclear Sarajevo, Bucher chose indignity over insanity, humanity over heroics,” wrote New York Post columnist James Wechsler, referring to the Serbian capital where World War I metastasized. “In a better time he may become a legend.”

  Even as the Navy put Bucher on notice that he might face a court-martial, critics sternly advised the Navy to back off. “If those five admirals think the people will sit still for making Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher the scapegoat for what went wrong in the Pueblo fiasco, they’re in for a big surprise,” declared U.S. Representative Samuel Stratton, a New York Democrat and member of the House Armed Services Committee. Added columnist Fifer, “I would estimate that 90 percent of the people in all walks of life would say the Navy deserves a torpedo-sized hole in its image if it puts the commander on trial. What gives anyway?”

  The message wasn’t lost on the new men in the White House. “Bucher comes off a decent and honorable officer,” wrote two aides to President Nixon in a January 23 summary of TV coverage of the court of inquiry. “All three networks reflected sympathetically on Bucher and adversely on Navy.” In a margin the president, himself a Navy veteran, penned a note to Defense Secretary Laird: “Don’t let Navy make a fool of itself.”

  In the undeclared public-relations war with the Navy, Bucher had won a decisive victory after only a few days. Harvey’s strategy was working; the press was firmly on the captain’s side. So was much of the public. “In essence, Harvey was running the court,” Captain William J. Crowe Jr., an aide to Admiral Moorer who’d drafted the Breeches Buoy repatriation plan, would later write. Crowe exaggerated the lawyer’s influence, but his point was well-taken. Harvey, added Crowe, “was winning decisions and positioning Bucher in just the right public spotlight.”

  The press loves an underdog, and reporters gravitated naturally to the skipper in his high-stakes battle with the Navy. “He was standing up against authority—everybody likes that,” remarked Bernard Weinraub, who covered the court of inquiry for The New York Times. “Also, you felt for him. He was very emotional. He was gutsy. And he was putting himself on the line. You never disliked him . . . but you realized that he was a flawed person.”

  While many newsmen liked and sympathized with the Pueblo commander, their attitude toward the admirals of the court was very different. Some reporters became so disdainful of Bowen and his colleagues that they refused to stand when “those punks” entered the courtroom. Others displayed no disrespect, but sensed an undercurrent of social caste running through the inquiry.

  George C. Wilson, a Washington Post military reporter, wrote that the hearings pitted “five glittering admirals” against a “mustang,” Navy slang for an officer who has risen from enlisted ranks. Weinraub discerned the same dynamic at work. “There was this distinct class difference,” he said. “The admirals were Annapolis [products] . . . and they were treating [Bucher] like an enlisted man of a low grade. They weren’t treating him like an officer. It was a tone. They weren’t treating him as one of their own. It was just evident.”

  The furious backlash against the Navy became a serious concern to Admiral Moorer. On January 25, he tried to calm the roiling waters with a speech before the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.

  Saying he was “deeply troubled” that the Article 0730 notice had been “widely misinterpreted,” Moorer reminded his audience of attorneys that Bucher was not on trial in Coronado. “The Navy is searching for facts, not scapegoats,” the admiral insisted. He asked the public “to be patient, not to prejudge, and to have full trust and confidence that the [court of inquiry is] being carried out by experienced men of great integrity who have only the welfare of our country at heart.”

  At an impromptu news conference two days later, Harvey and Bucher sought to reinforce Moorer’s assurances of evenhandedness. Harvey told reporters that Bucher felt his treatment by the admirals so far had been “eminently fair.” His remarks were purely voluntary, but many people assumed the brass had pressured him. As a result, noted a chagrined Ed Murphy, “the public thronged to [Bucher] in even greater numbers.”

  —

  Bowen closed the courtroom doors to the press and public following Bucher’s lengthy testimony, ostensibly to discuss sensitive matters of national security. Public relations may have been on his mind as well, because over the next four days a parade of high-ranking officers discussed key Navy assumptions about the spy-ship mission that turned out to be horribly flawed.

  Among those taking the witness chair were Admiral Frank L. Johnson, the onetime commander of U.S. naval forces in Japan, and several of his staff officers.

  The 61-year-old Johnson was a highly decorated war veteran. As skipper of the destroyer USS Purdy during the Okinawa invasion, he’d won not one but two Navy Crosses. One was for his extraordinary actions in saving the USS Mullany, another destroyer abandoned after kamikazes badly damaged it. As fires burned near the Mullany’s magazine, which could have exploded
at any moment, Johnson brought his vessel alongside. His crew managed to extinguish the blazes, allowing the Mullany to be salvaged. But many years had passed since Johnson’s days as a dashing wartime destroyerman. Now, with his white hair, chubby cheeks, and bland manner, the admiral came across more like a cautious small-town banker.

  Johnson and his former subordinates described how they’d developed a schedule of nine missions over six months in 1968 for the Pueblo and the Banner and then bucked it up the chain of command for approval. Johnson’s area of operations was enormous; his surveillance ships could be sent anywhere from the East China Sea to the Bering Sea. But winter storms put the northernmost destinations out of bounds, and the State Department had made it clear, ever since the Banner had been harassed off China, that it wanted the snooping shifted to other locales.

  That left the Sea of Japan and the Tsushima Strait. Soviet warships patrolled continuously in the strait, and COMNAVFORJAPAN had photographed most of them already. So Johnson’s staff decided to focus on North Korean coastal defenses and naval activity in the Sea of Japan. A young lieutenant who worked for Johnson did much of the initial mission planning.

  The Navy didn’t have exclusive control over the AGERs, however. It had to share their “tasking” with the National Security Agency, and that generated some tension. The NSA wanted to collect information on “national” intelligence targets, while the Navy was more interested in data of tactical value to its fleet commanders. It was agreed that the two agencies would divide up the nine AGER missions, with the Navy designing the first one, to be carried out by the Pueblo.

  After Johnson signed off on the schedule, he forwarded it to the Honolulu headquarters of Admiral Hyland, commander of the Pacific Fleet. Hyland approved and sent it a few miles down the road to his boss, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. From there it went to Washington, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff green-lighted it.