Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Americans embraced Bucher for the reason that he hadn’t thrown away lives for the sake of some quixotic notion of military honor or tradition. The more thoughtful ones understood, too, that regardless of the court’s outcome, Bucher for the rest of his days was condemned to mentally replay the events of that ferocious afternoon in the Sea of Japan, doubting and second-guessing himself, wondering whether he’d been tough enough, searching his innermost self for some mortifying streak of yellow.

  And that was a harsher and more crippling sentence than anything the Navy could dish out.

  —

  On the evening before the last day of court, the admirals, lower-ranking officers, journalists, and some crewmen got together at a local hotel for a party marking the occasion. Bucher stepped up to Admiral Bowen at one point and nervously shook his hand. “He still loves the Navy so much,” one of the captain’s shipmates observed to a newsman as they watched the scene. “But the Navy sure doesn’t love him.”

  The next day, March 13, Bucher made his last remarks to the court, stating “unequivocally” that he hadn’t had the power to resist. Harvey followed with an eloquent closing argument.

  The lawyer began by noting the inherent cruelty of a court of inquiry. Fresh from a disaster at sea, traumatized men were pummeled with probing, sometimes humiliating questions. Their actions and behavior under extreme duress were mercilessly dissected in public; they were forced to relive experiences that forever would haunt them. But if the inquiry at times resembled an inquisition, it also served vital purposes: Lessons must be learned from the misadventure, and military leaders must be held accountable for their decisions.

  “On the sea there is a tradition older even than the traditions of our nation, and wiser in its trust than our ‘new morality,’” said Harvey. “It is the tradition that with authority goes responsibility, and with both goes accountability.”

  Bucher had accounted for his actions, but for what should he be held responsible? As Navy experts testified behind closed doors, the Pueblo incident had led to extensive modifications of the two surviving AGERs. They now carried far less classified material, and sensitive documents were printed on paper that dissolved in water. Explosives capable of scuttling the vessels in 15 minutes had been installed, along with thermite for rapidly melting electronics. Itemizing these improvements, Harvey portrayed Bucher as “either a prophet or a man ahead of his time.”

  “He knew what was needed on an AGER. The [new] destruct gear has been described by the experts with great pride; Commander Bucher would have settled for three cans of TNT. We’ve seen a demonstration of water-soluble paper; Commander Bucher would have settled for a reduced publications allowance. . . . The .50-caliber guns have been removed; Commander Bucher thought they were inappropriate when put aboard.”

  Harvey emphasized that the Pueblo wasn’t a combat ship and couldn’t possibly have fought a pitched battle at sea. He went over the Navy’s faulty assumptions about North Korean reactions, the absence of air or surface support, the admonition to Bucher not to “start a war out there.”

  “As the North Koreans closed his ship, Commander Bucher did everything in accordance with his previous instructions. He identified his nationality, maintained his right to be where he was, attempted to depart the area in a dignified manner, maintained course and speed when the Koreans tried to divert him, kept his guns covered, did not appear aggressive or provocative, and made the required reports to his command. When the North Koreans became serious about seizing or sinking the Pueblo, the commanding officer had no credible power to resist.”

  A commander, Harvey pointed out, is the only person in a position to know whether his men have the capacity to fight back. “It has been stated, although not in this courtroom, that it might have appeared better for the Navy if 15 or 20 [sailors] had been killed, rather than only one,” he said. “This type of irresponsible statement only accentuates the horrible decision that the commanding officer was confronted with in determining how long he could hold out.”

  Whether the captain could have done things differently, his attorney continued, would always be a matter of speculation. But he insisted there was “not one shred of evidence” that Bucher had had the physical power to prevent the seizure. The skipper’s performance, he added, “was, under the circumstances, outstanding.”

  Bucher also shone in the way he led his men in prison, Harvey told the admirals. “The chain of command was maintained, leadership was exerted, escape plans formulated and evaluated,” he said. “Every method was used to resist the North Koreans. None accepted favor or parole; each kept faith with the others.”

  Harvey revisited the crew’s successes in discrediting communist propaganda and urged that every man injured in prison be awarded the Purple Heart. The sailors signed propaganda statements and participated in enemy press conferences only under the “grossest . . . coercion and duress imaginable,” he said, adding pointedly that “such coercion and duress must have far exceeded that imposed upon our nation to obtain the false confession that resulted in the repatriation of the crew.”

  Rather than condemn Bucher, the admirals should applaud him, Harvey concluded. “We have been privileged to see a man, a real man, who has been tried by his enemies, been found to be successful, who was returned to his homeland and accounted fully for his actions. His greatest reward would be to be returned to full duty and to occupy his rightful position in a normal Navy career pattern.”

  The lawyer sat back down. The admirals remained expressionless, offering no clue to their reactions.

  Newsome declined to present a final summation. Bowen asked if the court members had any questions and, hearing none, closed the proceedings. After eight grueling weeks, Bucher’s latest ordeal was over.

  The captain stepped outside into the rain to face the TV cameras. Rose stood beside him, holding his hand. “I love the Navy,” said Bucher. “I want to stay in, if they’ll let me.” He would await the admirals’ verdict, he said, with “considerable apprehension.”

  CHAPTER 18

  BALM OF MERCY

  With the court hearings behind him, Bucher went into seclusion.

  Newspeople were driving him nuts, calling his house so often that he wanted to disconnect the phone. One of Miles Harvey’s law partners offered the use of his vacation home in Borrego Springs, a small resort town in the desert northeast of San Diego, and the captain gathered up his wife and sons and went there for a week to recuperate. The family also spent several days in Acapulco.

  Though Bucher was on edge about his legal prospects, Harvey remained optimistic. One hundred and four witnesses had appeared before the court, generating almost 3,400 pages of testimony. The admirals now had to review that voluminous record and draft their official findings and recommendations. Their report was expected to reach Admiral Hyland’s desk in the next few weeks.

  While the court members pondered his fate, the captain embarked on a series of trips, basking in unbridled public adulation wherever he went.

  His first stop was the small Colorado city of Pueblo, his ship’s namesake town, where more than 500 enthusiastic citizens flocked to the airport to meet him and his family.

  The Buchers rode into town in a convertible escorted by a police car and Shriners on motorcycles. At City Hall the captain was surrounded by news reporters as a high school band played. The mayor hailed Bucher as “one who has demonstrated outstanding valor” and presented him with a plaque. The following evening, he and Rose were the guests of honor at the annual chamber of commerce dinner, packed with a sellout crowd of 600.

  Then there was a triumphant visit to Boys Town, which the skipper described as “the most glorious day of my life.”

  As he stepped off his plane in Omaha on April 23, 1969, more than 900 boys—the juvenile refuge’s entire population—greeted him with cheers, whistles, and a sea of waving American flags. The Boys Town band belted out “Anchors
Aweigh.” Some of the kids got so excited they vaulted a fence bordering the airfield to pound Bucher’s back, shake his hand, and tell him he was their hero. The beaming commander—tanned and 40 pounds heavier since leaving North Korea—ambled along the fence, pumping scores of outstretched hands. His voice cracked as he tried to thank every boy individually.

  “I’m glad to be home,” he said, over and over. “This is my home.”

  The youngsters rushed back to Boys Town on buses while the Buchers wound through the streets of Omaha in a 30-car motorcade. At the gates of Boys Town, the kids gave Bucher a second exuberant welcome, complete with fireworks and wailing sirens. Engulfed by fresh-faced admirers, Bucher and his family sauntered down a flag-bedecked street with Monsignor Nicholas Wegner, Boys Town’s director. That night, Bucher ate with the youths, who gave him one standing ovation as he entered the dining hall, another when he rose to speak, and yet another when he finished.

  The captain was the featured guest the next evening at a dinner that filled Boys Town’s cavernous Field House with 1,200 people. Among them were Nebraska’s governor, both U.S. senators, and a congressman who’d recently introduced a bill to award Bucher the Medal of Honor. With an enormous “Welcome Home, Pete” banner hanging from a wall, the event was a giant lovefest for the skipper.

  “You’re a courageous man, a man of character, a man of duty,” Father Wegner told Bucher in front of the adoring audience. “You’ll always be a hero in the eyes of these young men, and in fact in the eyes of the entire nation. You deserve every honor this nation can confer upon you.” Governor Norbert Tiemann described the captain as “one of the most gallant men this country has ever produced.” Senator Roman Hruska, noting that the Navy hadn’t yet reached a decision on Bucher’s future, declared, “As far as the American public is concerned, the verdict has already been returned. It is a verdict of commendation and tribute and honor for a courageous and honorable sailor and his intrepid shipmates.” Hruska later called the dinner “one of the most moving events of my life.”

  A few days later Bucher went to Chicago, sightseeing along the Loop and dining at the famed Pump Room, where the house orchestra serenaded him and Rose as other diners stood and applauded.

  At the Sherman House the following night, the captain delivered a corker of a speech to more than 800 Notre Dame alumni, assailing communists, campus radicals, and “vipers in our midst spreading anti-Americanism.”

  Bucher wasn’t supposed to comment publicly on the Pueblo court of inquiry before the Navy made a final ruling, but he couldn’t resist a few pokes at the military. “I feel the United States let me and my men down. I personally had assurances from high officials in the U.S. Navy that, were we attacked by enemy forces, planes would come to our aid. No planes came.” (In fact, Bucher had been told the opposite in Hawaii: that if attacked, he probably was on his own.)

  The skipper also faulted the Nixon administration for not retaliating against North Korea over its latest atrocity: the April 14, 1969, shoot-down of an unarmed American reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan. Thirty-one U.S. airmen perished.

  The downed craft was an EC-121, the military designation for a converted Lockheed Constellation, an aging, propeller-driven airliner packed with six tons of electronic listening gear. It had been flying about 90 miles southeast of the port of Chongjin when two MiG fighters pounced on it.

  For President Nixon, the incident must have seemed like an awful case of déjà vu. During his campaign for the White House, he’d criticized Lyndon Johnson for allowing the Pueblo to be captured by “a fourth-rate military power like North Korea” and pledged that if elected, he would “not let this happen again.” Now, as commander in chief, Nixon faced a nearly identical crisis, except with a graver loss of American lives and fewer options for responding.

  The United States immediately suspended all eavesdropping flights near North Korea, and American search planes and ships rushed to the area where the EC-121 went down. The Soviets, evidently caught off guard again by their bellicose allies in Pyongyang, dispatched two destroyers to help look for survivors. A U.S. plane reported seeing dim lights on the water at night, but only three bodies of EC-121 fliers were recovered.

  The situation was even more complicated than the Pueblo, because National Security Agency intercepts indicated the attack might have been a mistake, the product of miscommunication between one of the MiG pilots and his ground controller. Nonetheless, North Korea quickly claimed responsibility for the outrage, boasting that its jets had “scored the brilliant battle success of shooting [the EC-121] down with a single shot.”

  Cries for vengeance weren’t long in coming. On Capitol Hill, U.S. Representative Mendel Rivers, a conservative South Carolina Democrat who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, proclaimed, “There can be only one answer for America—retaliation, retaliation, retaliation!” Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, pressed for a U.S. counterstrike on North Korean air bases. Nixon himself viewed the shoot-down as an act of cold-blooded mass murder; among the responses he considered were a military attack on North Korea and seizure of one of the Dutch-built fish-processing ships, then sailing near Cape Town, South Africa, on its way to North Korea.

  However, the new Republican president, like his Democratic predecessor, had his hands full with Vietnam. Nixon’s secretaries of defense and state both counseled against hitting North Korea. As with the Pueblo, any major retaliation ran the risk of triggering an invasion of South Korea by Kim Il Sung’s forces and escalation to general war. William Porter, the ever-prudent ambassador to Seoul, warned that President Park might interpret a U.S. airstrike as permission to invade the North. And aside from hawks like Rivers, Americans seemed to have little stomach for another hard-to-exit military adventure in Asia.

  For three days, Nixon took no action as his advisers debated what to do. There was nothing to negotiate the return of, since the EC-121 crew was dead and the plane destroyed. (The United States lodged a complaint at Panmunjom, but North Korea’s representative responded with only an insolent question: “Whom does the aircraft belong to?”) Since a United Nations protest coupled with no other action might make him look weak, the president eventually chose a face-saving middle course: He announced that American snooper flights would resume, but with armed protection. Like LBJ, he also sent an armada into the Sea of Japan: 40 ships, including the Enterprise, three other aircraft carriers, three cruisers, 22 destroyers, five submarines, and the famed battleship New Jersey.

  But, again like Johnson, Nixon ordered no punitive actions and the mammoth naval squadron ultimately withdrew. For the second time in little more than a year, Kim Il Sung had sucker punched Uncle Sam and walked away unscathed. A secret CIA report speculated that the North Koreans’ decision to open fire on the EC-121 probably was “strongly influenced” by Washington’s failure to avenge the Pueblo.

  —

  Even before the court of inquiry ended, Congress had concluded that the admirals weren’t adequately addressing some of the biggest questions arising from the Pueblo affair. Who’d given final approval for the mission? Why was no concerted effort made to rescue the ship?

  The House Armed Services Committee impaneled a special subcommittee to investigate. Its chairman was U.S. Representative Otis Pike, an irreverent, often cantankerous Democrat who represented much of Long Island, New York. Pike had flown 120 missions as a Marine dive-bomber and night-fighter pilot in the Pacific during World War II and was well versed on naval matters. Elected to Congress in 1960, he was known for a sharp tongue that he enjoyed honing on recalcitrant bureaucrats—including those of the military variety—who appeared before him. He once killed a bill to give flight pay to deskbound admirals by demonstrating, on the House floor, how difficult it was to fly a desk.

  Pike inaugurated his hearings on March 4, 1969, calling a who’s who of top Pentagon and intelligence officials to testify. Unlike Admiral Bowen, with
his limited power to call high-ranking witnesses, Pike could subpoena virtually anyone in the government. Among those he called were General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Moorer, the chief of naval operations; Admiral Sharp, former commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific; and Rear Admiral Horace Epes, the cautious air commander of the Enterprise. The parade of witnesses also included the heads of the CIA, National Security Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

  One of the first orders of business was to find out who at the top had green-lighted the Pueblo mission.

  As the court of inquiry already had learned, Admiral Johnson’s staff in Japan concocted the voyage. Sharp’s command in Honolulu subsequently endorsed it. On December 23, 1967, Sharp’s headquarters forwarded the mission proposal to the Joint Chiefs in Washington. The JCS staff then bundled the Pueblo with more than 800 other sea- and airborne reconnaissance sorties planned around the globe during the month of January 1968, and delivered the whole package to the chiefs for review.

  But, with the holidays looming, the January reconnaissance “book” wasn’t handled in the usual fashion.

  The Joint Chiefs normally met three times a week in “the tank,” a large Pentagon conference room dominated by a heavy walnut table surrounded by 16 red leather chairs. Before the meetings, each chief was supposed to be briefed about every item on the agenda, including recon schedules. If the chiefs had a question about a specific mission, they could ask for a detailed explanation from Air Force General Ralph Steakley, head of the Joint Reconnaissance Center, an arm of the JCS that coordinated all U.S. eavesdropping forays worldwide.

  When the January book came up for review, however, only two of the five principals were in town. General Wheeler was away on leave. General Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief, was in Southeast Asia. And the Marine commandant, General Wallace Greene Jr., was retiring in a few days.