The recommendations were forwarded to Admiral Hyland, who held the firm belief that a captain is solely responsible for everything that happens on his vessel. Hyland was appalled that Bucher hadn’t broken out small arms to drive off the boarders and had let them capture his classified papers and equipment. That loss, the admiral believed, could one day cost many American lives. He wanted Bucher punished.
Hyland endorsed Bowen’s call for a court-martial and notified Washington of his decision. But the hardheaded realists at the top of the Navy’s chain of command knew putting Bucher on trial wasn’t a practical possibility; the public simply wouldn’t stand for it. Admiral Bernard Clarey, the vice chief of naval operations, and two aides got on the phone with Hyland, explaining how politicized the case had become and urging him to alter his views. Finally, “grumbling and dragging his heels,” Hyland hung up.
But the Pacific fleet commander got the message. He quietly withdrew his earlier court-martial endorsement. In a fresh memo, he said Bucher and Harris should receive only letters of reprimand, and agreed that Murphy’s punishment should be a letter of admonition. He wrote that the charges against Johnson should be reduced to failing to establish the Pueblo’s capacity for rapid destruction. Gladding, he said, shouldn’t be sanctioned at all.
In Washington, Admiral Moorer quickly concurred with the softened recommendations.
One of the Navy’s biggest hot potatoes in years finally landed on the desk of Navy Secretary John Chafee, appointed to his post only three months earlier by President Nixon.
Rangy and athletic, Chafee was a Rhode Islander, descended from one of the wealthy “five families” that once ran the state before Irish and Italian immigrants changed its demographics and politics in the 1930s. When World War II broke out, Chafee dropped out of Yale and joined the Marines, seeing action on Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He later enrolled at Harvard Law School and, in 1951, was recalled to active duty and served as a Marine company commander in Korea.
A moderate Republican, Chafee was elected governor of Rhode Island in 1962. In 1968, he abandoned his campaign for a fourth term after a horse fatally kicked his 14-year-old daughter in the head. A few months later, Chafee was named Navy secretary even though he’d backed Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, a fellow moderate, over Nixon in the GOP presidential primaries.
Chafee took over the Navy at a time when its reputation was more tattered than at any other in modern memory. Like the other armed services, the Navy had suffered from the public’s growing distaste for the Vietnam War. Racial tensions in the ranks were flaring. But the Navy had its own unique problems as well, including horrifying fires that broke out on two aircraft carriers. In January 1969, the month Chafee took office, an inferno on the Enterprise left 26 sailors dead and 85 injured. In 1967, an even deadlier fire had swept the USS Forrestal, killing 134 men. A nationwide poll commissioned by the Navy found its prestige had fallen to “a very poor fourth” among the services, behind the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps.
The Pueblo only aggravated the situation. Chafee was savvy enough to recognize that any missteps in the final disposition of the case had the potential to badly burn both him and the Navy. In ruling on his admirals’ conflicting recommendations, he had to tread a narrow path between imposing too much punishment on Bucher—thereby infuriating a sympathetic press and public—and imposing too little, which would anger many old-line Navy officers. If he disciplined the captain but no one of higher rank, he’d doubtless be accused of scapegoating the easiest target.
Sitting in his Pentagon office, with its sobering views of the Iwo Jima Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, the fledgling secretary considered what to do. He assigned his special counsel, Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, to read and summarize the entire court of inquiry transcript. The task took Staring a full week. But by early May, Chafee was ready to act.
He called a press conference for the morning of May 6. He opened it by revealing the court of inquiry’s recommended charges against Bucher and the four other officers, and Hyland’s proposed reductions of those charges. Chafee candidly admitted that mistakes and miscalculations by the Navy had led to what he called the Pueblo’s “lonely confrontation by unanticipatedly bold and hostile forces.”
The secretary said he wasn’t in a position to judge “the guilt or innocence of any of the officers.” The most important factor in the debacle, he said, was the “sudden collapse” of the premise that the Pueblo’s presence in international waters would protect it. It was an assumption that had been shared up and down the chain of command, from Bucher to the Pentagon. Thus the consequences of the ship’s seizure, Chafee said, “must in fairness be borne by all, rather than by one or two individuals whom circumstances had placed closer to the crucial event.”
Because of this collective responsibility, the secretary said he was overruling his admirals. Bucher and his men had endured a great deal of punishment in North Korea and they’d face no further judicial action by the Navy.
“They have suffered enough,” said Chafee. Reporters raced for the phones.
—
Chafee was widely praised for his wisdom and compassion. With a shrewd compromise, he’d guided the Navy past a dangerous political shoal. By publicizing the court of inquiry’s allegations, he’d paid homage to the Navy establishment’s strong disapproval of Bucher’s surrender. Yet the secretary also acknowledged the Navy’s errors and spread a balm of mercy over what had appeared, to many observers, to be unduly severe legal proceedings against the captain. Moreover, Chafee had firmly shut the door against a new round of court hearings that might well expose more details of slipshod Navy planning and provoke an even more rancorous backlash from the public, press, and Congress.
A few hours after Chafee’s news conference, Bucher and Harvey held one of their own. The reporters wanted the captain’s reaction to Chafee’s ruling. Angry thoughts clogged Bucher’s mind. His respect for the Navy—particularly its leaders and their sense of justice—had been “dashed to pieces.” The admirals of the court, he believed, wanted him keelhauled for refusing to make his men commit suicide. Bucher could hardly speak due to a bad case of laryngitis, and he was afraid of what might pop out of his mouth anyway. He deferred to Harvey, who read a short statement.
“As far as we’re concerned,” said the lawyer, “Commander Bucher has been cleared.”
But he hadn’t been cleared. At best, he’d been preemptively pardoned. Since the admirals’ allegations would not be formally lodged against him, he had no legal right to publicly refute them before a court-martial. A cloud of unresolved doubt—about his competence, his courage—now hung over him. And he might never be able to make it go away.
CHAPTER 19
A DAY IN THE SUN
The next couple of years were difficult ones for Bucher.
In September 1969, the Navy gave him a sought-after billet at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where the captain intended to take a year of management classes.
Things went well at first. Bucher and his family lived in a comfortable house with a brick fireplace and a soothing screen of pine trees. His classes were tough and Bucher sometimes had to study all night to make sense of subjects, like calculus, that he’d never done well in. But he held his own, getting an A, two Bs, and a C in his first term.
The superintendent and several instructors went out of their way to make him feel welcome, and he experienced no overt hostility from the faculty or fellow students. But wherever he went he sensed appraising eyes on him. When he passed two people conversing, he imagined, with a touch of paranoia, that he was their subject.
“I didn’t really get any static from any of those people up there, but I could see them talking about me,” he remembered. “And I often wondered, ‘What the hell are they saying?’ I couldn’t walk anywhere without people looking at me.”
After only a few months, his
health began to fray. Shattering headaches lasting up to three days plagued him. His right hip and leg, where he’d been kicked so many times, still bothered him; blind spots in his right eye were an enduring legacy of malnutrition. He had to undergo surgery on his nose, which Silver Lips had broken during Hell Week.
At night, he was visited by terrible dreams. In one, he was back in North Korea, again listening helplessly as his men screamed and moaned in nearby cells. Bodies crashed into walls; guards shouted and cursed and cocked assault rifles—Bucher’s mind writhed with terrifying sounds and images.
Another dream was pure fantasy but somehow even more frightening.
After the captain and his men finally made it home, a high-ranking official of the American government told them an awful mistake had been made. The repatriation wasn’t done correctly; the crew must go back to North Korea. Horrified, the captain ordered his men to flee into the rugged backcountry of San Diego County. They collected guns and food, kissed weeping wives and children good-bye, and began a desperate exodus.
Hurrying over the sere hills, the men lost their way. Night fell; some of them drifted off the trail and vanished in the dark. Their frightened leader couldn’t figure out where he and his remaining sailors were or how to get to a safe hiding place. How close were the pursuing federal agents? The exhausted fugitives knew it was only a matter of time before they’d be caught and forced back to the brutality and degradation and bladder-voiding fear of a communist hellhole, where God only knew what new torments awaited them. . . .
Shuddering awake, Bucher would find his face moist with sweat. He’d slip out of bed, careful not to wake his sleeping spouse. Padding into the living room, he tuned the radio to a classical music station. In the blackness he listened to the calming melodies of Schubert and Mahler, sitting still as a statue until his panic subsided.
Weighed down by physical and psychological troubles, he fell further behind in his studies and eventually dropped out of the Postgraduate School.
But he didn’t falter on another project: his memoirs. Aided by a professional writer, Bucher cranked out a riveting narrative titled Bucher: My Story, which hit bookstores in August 1970 and rapidly became a bestseller.
While painting Schumacher, Law, and others in a flattering light, My Story was predictably hard on Murphy, portraying him as feckless, cowardly, and disliked by the crew. The following year, Murphy struck back with his own memoir, Second in Command, which was little more than a lengthy counterattack on his ex-boss. Its unrelenting spitefulness made some reviewers recoil. “We now have a book castigating Pueblo’s skipper, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, as a drunk, a coward, a liar, a hypocrite, a chiseler, a skirt-chaser, a misfit, an oddball, a poor leader, and a ‘lousy ship handler,’” wrote one critic, adding that Murphy’s screed contained “so many caustic remarks about Bucher’s character that readers may find some of the pages downright embarrassing to digest.” The reviewer noted that it was only fair for Murphy to have a right of reply to Bucher’s book, but expressed hope that “perhaps now we’ve heard an end to the name-calling.”
My Story also provoked a public quarrel between Bucher and Gene Lacy over which of them had actually stopped the Pueblo under fire.
Captain Newsome first raised that issue during the court of inquiry, but Bucher claimed he couldn’t remember.
Q: With respect to stopping the ship, the first time, it is not quite clear whether it was at your direction or Mr. Lacy’s suggestion that the ship stop. Did he suggest that the ship stop and you approved it, or was it at your direction that the ship stop?
A: Well, sir, that particular sequence is not clear in my mind. I did not personally ring up the order to stop the ship the first time. I have given a great deal of thought to that, as to just who did do it, and what the sequence of events were, and I cannot with any degree of certainty recall the exact sequence. Nevertheless, the ship was stopped . . . and it must have been with my, at least, passive approval.
By the time his book came out, however, Bucher’s foggy memory had cleared up. He wrote that just after a cannon shell whizzed through the pilothouse, almost hitting Lacy’s head, the chief engineer shot him a “wild-eyed look” and screamed, “Are you going to stop this son of a bitch or not?” Without waiting for an answer, the captain’s book said, Lacy racked the annunciator to all-stop, cutting the engines.
In that moment, wrote Bucher, he realized that “my most experienced officer, my most trusted friend aboard this ill-starred little ship, had robbed me of the last vestige of support in my efforts to save the mission, leaving me alone with an Executive Officer who had proven to be unreliable and two very young and inexperienced junior officers on my bridge.”
The captain failed to tell his readers, however, that there was nothing to prevent him from restarting the engines. Nor did he mention the lie-detector test he took before beginning work on his memoir in an attempt to reassure himself that his recollection of “controversial issues” wasn’t faulty. (He passed, he said.)
The dispute broke into public view when The New York Times got hold of a prepublication copy of My Story. The newspaper reported that while Bucher denied ordering Lacy to stop, two other sailors on the bridge at the time—Law and Tim Harris—backed Lacy’s account that he’d acted on the captain’s command. “I don’t know whether he’s grasping at straws or what the hell the deal is on it,” Lacy told the paper.
Bucher insisted he hadn’t mentioned Lacy’s purported actions to the court of inquiry because he didn’t want to embarrass him or appear to be blaming a subordinate. But when it came time to pen his memoir, the captain said, he wanted to be “as accurate and forthcoming as I could” in telling the Pueblo story. Lacy no doubt felt blindsided and humiliated by his onetime friend. In a letter to the engineer after My Story was published, Bucher apologized for not including Lacy’s version of events. And in an interview many years afterward, the captain said he wished he’d never pointed an accusatory finger at his buddy.
“I regret having done it,” he conceded. “It really hurt Gene a lot. . . . It was years before we were able to have a conversation.”
—
The autumn of 1970 found Bucher in San Diego again. He desperately wanted to get back to sea. Instead, the Navy stuck him with a dead-end shore job checking the training records of reserve officers throughout Southern California. Frustrated and bored silly, he spent his days driving to various reservist centers and thumbing through personnel files.
“This job with the Reserves is unbelievable,” he wrote an acquaintance. “I am lost all the time.”
He felt like a pariah. At age forty-three, his career was over, he believed; the Navy would never give him a decent job again. His emotions veered between stubborn, visceral affection for the service and deepening anger and resentment at the brass for having ignored his pleas for help in the Sea of Japan. “I have tried not to let myself become bitter and become a crotchety old man,” he told one reporter, “but the bitterness keeps creeping through.” It positively burst through in an interview with the Washington Post:
“The Pueblo was the result of a tremendous amount of stupidity and poor planning by supposedly responsible officials in and out of the Navy,” Bucher said. “Many of them are still in the same jobs doing other things just as poorly—without ever having been held accountable for their actions. . . . It would have satisfied a great many, in and out of the Navy, if my crew had been completely wiped out. Then there would have been nobody to come back and haunt them. It would have been marvelous if we had stood up and committed suicide.”
In November 1970, Bucher failed a physical exam, raising the possibility of his forced retirement. Even if the Navy didn’t push him out, he decided to put in his papers after one more year. Yet the captain never wavered in his conviction that he’d done the right thing in giving up his ship. He had more than his share of nightmares, but at least he didn’t have the ghosts of dead s
ailors slipping into his bedroom every night to stare at him in silent anger and reproach. If he’d wasted lives trying to fight his way past the North Korean gunboats, he felt, he’d have much more to answer for. “I can shave and look right at myself in the mirror every morning,” he told an interviewer. “I know that I made the right decision.”
On the streets of San Diego, he still was a hero. Everywhere he went people recognized him: in restaurants, on airplanes. Strangers walked up to shake his hand and get his autograph; some well-wishers broke into tears. He was urged to run for public office. But his fondest desire was to be reassigned to sea duty “in any capacity on any ship afloat.”
With profits from his book, the skipper bought a comfortable ranch-style home in the small, semirural community of Poway, about 25 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. Set back from the road amid avocado and citrus trees, the house became a sanctuary for him and Rose. In his spare time he played chess with her and read extensively. He dreamed of coaching a football team after he retired, or maybe getting hired by National Geographic to sail to distant parts of the world and take photographs. Endlessly reliving the capture in his mind, he came to believe the North Koreans had mistaken the Pueblo for a South Korean intruder and, after realizing the vessel was American, grabbed it anyway.
Over time, some of his ailments went away. His vision problems lingered, but he no longer suffered from hand tremors or skull-cracking headaches. In July 1971, a medical board returned him to full duty. The Bureau of Naval Personnel, however, rebuffed his pleas for a job more suitable than babysitting reservists.
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