A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Elliott grinned and waved back. He was overcome by a sense of fulfillment, invigorated by the realization that his experience with the 4482nd had been invaluable. During his time in the Pacific, he picked up a case of amoebic dysentery that would recur throughout his life, but also something far more important. “I didn’t put in all this work and sweat and energy into the company without getting anything back,” he wrote. “What I got back—in addition to the priceless respect and confidence and friendship of my men, and even in addition to the personal satisfaction of successfully accomplishing a mission—was a renewed and strengthened belief that the power of America lies in its people. I learned that I was one of them. I learned again that to be a leader of men a person must be trustworthy, strong, determined and above all else, selfless. It was that, more than anything else, which finally knocked the anomalies out of my thinking, actions, and character. For over ten months now, I have been strictly on the spot. One false move, one phony trick, and this company would have slipped out of control, irretrievably. I’ve learned that you get only in proportion to what you give. To this company, I’ve given everything in me, and I’ve gotten more out of it than I have from anything I’ve ever done. For the rest of my life, I intend to keep on ‘giving out’ with everything in me, for the things I believe and the people I love.”

  — PART THREE —

  Trials and Tribulations

  19

  * * *

  The Virginian

  ON THE THIRD Friday of March 1946, Frank S. Tavenner Jr. boarded a flight from Washington to San Francisco, the first leg of a journey that would take him across the Pacific to Tokyo. He had fought as an infantry officer in France during World War I, the war that was supposed to end all wars, and now he was seeking punishment for leaders of an aggressor nation that had attacked America during World War II. On leave from his post as U.S. attorney for the western district of Virginia, he was bound for a temporary assignment as a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, more commonly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. At age fifty, bespectacled, jowly, and pear-shaped in his three-piece suits, he was an unprepossessing southern gentleman with a soft drawl, sharp mind, and composed manner who was born into politics but had never held elective office, despite family connections and deep ties to a powerful political machine. The courtroom was his domain.

  This was six years before Tavenner interrogated my father and challenged his loyalty to America, but my father would have approved of the Virginian’s mission to Tokyo. If an invasion of Japan had been necessary to end the war, putting the lives of untold thousands of American soldiers at risk, Lieutenant Maraniss and his salvage and repair company would have been part of it. My father had seen and heard enough on Okinawa to be repelled by the Japanese way of war; in an uncharacteristically harsh assessment, he had even written in a letter to my mother, “The samurai of Japan are as cruel, ruthless, unprincipled a group of men as ever trod the earth. I have no more feeling toward them than I do toward a poisonous snake or rat.”

  Not long into Tavenner’s flight west from Washington on that March day, he looked out the window to the countryside below and caught glimpses of his home turf. Front Royal, Strasburg, Woodstock. Then Kern’s Gap in North Mountain came into view, and through it he could just see the apple orchards that had been operated by the Tavenner family since the turn of the century. He was overwhelmed, he wrote in a letter home soon after, “by the beauty of the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah Valley.”

  The transpacific flight from San Francisco to Tokyo was less familiar, but remarkable in its own way. As the only passenger on a military cargo plane, he flew as “freight” along with the other cargo: crates of smallpox serum packed in dry ice. “It seems that it took a smallpox epidemic to get me through,” he joked in a letter he sent back to the U.S. attorney’s office after the plane made a fuel stop in Honolulu. In its Socials and Clubs notices a few days later, the Woodstock Herald reported that Judge Frank S. Tavenner Sr. had received a cablegram from his son announcing his safe arrival in Tokyo. He and the serum got there at the peak of the smallpox outbreak, with 1,405 new patients—feverish, vomiting, hideously pocked—seeking treatment that week, most of them in the metropolitan regions of Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo.

  Even before Tavenner reached Japan, he had undertaken a research assignment delegated to him by Joseph B. Keenan, chief of counsel for the U.S. delegation. Keenan had been director of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, where criminals he had prosecuted included the American gangsters Machine Gun Kelly and Ma Barker. Now he and his staff were pursuing criminals of a different sort: the leaders of Japan’s war machine, led by Hideki Tojo, the former prime minister and general of the Imperial Army who had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. Keenan wanted Tavenner to establish that even before hostilities began the Japanese had entered into secret pacts with Hitler’s Nazi regime on how they would conduct warfare against the United States and the Soviet Union. As it turned out, Tavenner’s role became much larger. Only weeks after he arrived, Keenan fell ill and departed for Washington, leaving Tavenner in charge as acting chief counsel.

  The tribunal followed the model of the Nuremberg Trials of high-ranking Nazi officials in Germany. Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers during the postwar occupation of Japan, appointed a panel of twelve judges: two from the U.S., one from the Soviet Union, and nine from other Allied nations. The prosecution teams were also international, led by the U.S. and including lawyers from the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. They were to make the cases against twenty-eight Japanese defendants, including nine high-ranking civilian officials and Tojo and most of his general staff. Notably not charged were Emperor Hirohito and other members of the imperial family. This controversial omission was said to be a matter of practical politics; it was believed that the transformation of postwar Japan would be easier with Hirohito’s symbolic endorsement.

  Documents detailing Tavenner’s actions in Tokyo, later archived at the Arthur J. Morris Law Library at the University of Virginia, reveal how he faced one difficulty after another, from internal jealousies and disagreements within the American delegation to problems involving simultaneous translations (and transcript translations) and headaches dealing with his Soviet counterpart. One of his first decisions involved whether and how to explain the absence of Keenan, his boss. According to an internal memo, Tavenner was called by a captain in the tribunal’s public relations office and told that the Associated Press was ready to run a story revealing Keenan’s sudden and unexpected departure for the States. The captain told Tavenner that he had prepared a press release “denying the correctness of the news item.” Tavenner figured he had three choices: approve the press release; ignore it, which would mean it would still go out; or tell the press office not to deny Keenan’s departure. The best and proper course, he decided, was to tell the truth. “I knew you wanted no announcement made,” he wrote to Keenan, “but the announcement was nevertheless going to be made, and I was of the opinion that any other action on my part would aggravate the situation rather than help it.”

  On May 1, shortly before the arraignments and opening of the trials, Tavenner held a press conference for the international press corps. He was asked why Japanese lawyers had not been allowed to meet with defendants at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. That was a matter beyond the control of the prosecution team, Tavenner said, adding that the prosecutors had decided that no more interrogations should be undertaken at the prison until the matter of defense access was resolved. Another questioner brought up a rumor spreading across Tokyo, that a dance hall had been built in the court building and that court members were partying and eating delicious food while the defendants were waiting to see if they would be sentenced to death. This rumor spawned a phrase to describe it: “the Dance of Death.” The questioner posited that this contrast between doomed men and carefree, well-fed judges “
would have a very bad effect on the Japanese people.” What did Tavenner think? “My personal view is the same as yours,” he said, “that it would be a very bad thing should such a thing exist, but I am confident that it is a product of a very vivid imagination, to say the least.”

  But it was carried in a “first-class” Japanese newspaper, the questioner pointed out.

  “That is rather in the nature of a scurrilous statement,” Tavenner said. “It seems to me that it should be checked before publication.” He did not point out what he soon complained about privately: that conditions at the Matsui House, where he and the American tribunal employees were quartered, became so dire at one point that there was concern their Japanese staff could not be fed due to a lack of food.

  When questioned as to why Emperor Hirohito was not included in the indictments, Tavenner nimbly provided a nonanswer: “It is presumed that those charged with the preparation of the indictments were satisfied in their own minds that they were preparing a proper indictment.”

  The trials began in early May and lasted for nearly two years, until late April 1948. Tavenner was there from the opening statement to the final summation, though there were many temptations for him to return to Virginia. He was married and had two children, and though his wife, Sarah, visited him in Tokyo, she was more often back home. He was encouraged to run for Congress from Virginia’s Seventh District when that seat became open in 1946, but he told friends in Woodstock that his duties in Tokyo meant that “under no circumstances” could he accept the nomination. The Southern Railway System offered him a lucrative job as counsel later that same year, but he also turned that down. The one job he would have taken was on the Court of Appeals of Virginia, when there was a vacancy, but although he gained permission from the Justice Department to pursue it, the appointment never came. All the while he was in Japan, Virginia was never far from his mind. He held on to the vision he had glimpsed out the window on the first leg of the flight to Tokyo, when he caught a faint faraway view of Kern’s Gap and the Tavenner orchards below.

  * * *

  THE TAVENNER NAME was well known in Woodstock and its environs for influence and apples, which makes sense since the two were synonymous in the Shenandoah Valley. Another large apple operation out there, in the fields near Winchester thirty miles to the north, was run by the family of Harry Flood Byrd, whose political machine controlled state politics for much of the twentieth century. Byrd got his political start by succeeding Tavenner Sr. in the Virginia Senate from the Tenth District, then rose to become governor for four years and a U.S. senator for thirty more. He also owned the major newspaper in the Shenandoah, the Winchester Star. He and Tavenner Sr. were friendly competitors in the apple industry and allies in the political realm as conservative southern Democrats who adhered to the racial biases and traditions of the Old South while pursuing their own entrepreneurial agendas.

  How appropriate that the apple would emerge in this search to understand the forces that intersected in Room 740 and the question of what it means to be American. The home territory of the future HUAC chief counsel was apple territory in a state—and nation—rich in apple history. The settlers at Jamestown brought the first apple seeds to North America in 1607, and by the end of that century there were orchards with as many as 2,500 apple trees in some parts of the commonwealth. By the time Woodstock was chartered in 1761, apples were emerging as a staple of the American diet, and for generations thereafter commercial orchards became ever more lucrative. “The orchards of Virginia are today worth more than the gold mines of other sections,” the Shenandoah Herald proclaimed in 1905, the same year that a pomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture listed seventeen thousand different apple varieties, of different colors, shapes, and sizes.

  The apple holds a special place in mythology, its evocations as contradictory as America itself. Emerson called the apple “the American fruit,” even though it, like almost everything else American, came from somewhere else. The apple symbolized both the domestic and the wild, the innocent and the fallen, the vibrancy of the New World and the hackneyed clichés of shirtsleeve patriotism. As American as apple pie. Johnny Appleseed spreading apple trees through the heartland. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. How do you like them apples? Henry David Thoreau, the national contrarian, disdained cultivated varieties and yearned for apples “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” There’s a rotten apple in every bunch. Which leads to the most famous apple of all, that forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Did Eve, at the urging of Satan disguised as a snake, bite into an apple? Scholars say it more likely would have been a fig, but John Milton used the word “apple” twice in Paradise Lost, and the apple appears in modern portrayals of the Bible’s foundation story of human sin.

  Few apple orchards in the valley were worth more than the Tavenner family’s vast nurseries of Winesap and Ben Davis varieties, described by the Herald as “among the finest placed upon the market.” When Tavenner Sr. was in the Virginia Senate, his key accomplishment also served his private interests as an orchardist, along with those of the Byrd empire. He was chief sponsor of legislation to help protect apple growers by mandating the barely compensated or uncompensated destruction of fungus-infected cedar trees in proximity to apple orchards. The Cedar Rust Law, as it was called, was bitterly contested by cedar grove owners, and whenever the cases reached court, Tavenner was the counsel for the apple growers. His son inherited the apple orchards, as he did so much else.

  Born in 1895, Frank Jr. followed closely in the footsteps of Judge Tavenner, attending Roanoke College and Princeton University and attaining his law degree from Virginia. The family name was prominent enough that his daily doings might be recorded in the local newspapers from Woodstock to Winchester to Harrisonburg. Here was young Frank returning home from school for the Thanksgiving holiday; there he was receiving treatment for a head wound suffered in a college football game; now he was lettering as a captain on the Cavaliers baseball team; now he was volunteering for military service when the U.S. entered World War I.

  His army unit was the 1st Pioneer Infantry, a regiment composed of “men experienced in life in the open” who performed construction and engineering tasks and cleared roads and paths in the vanguard of troop movements to follow. The 1st Pioneers left the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey, and rounded the Statue of Liberty on July 8, 1918, sailing across the Atlantic in a convoy that included the ships America, LaFrance, Agamemnon, and Mount Vernon. They disembarked at Brest ten days later. Tavenner was a first lieutenant and commanded his own company. In France they saw action in three decisive battles on the Western Front between late July and Armistice Day. Nothing quiet about any of them—the Aisne-Marne offensive, Oise-Aisne offensive, and Meuse-Argonne offensive. When the fighting was over, Tavenner’s unit went to Germany for several months to hold the ancient Ehrenbreitstein Fortress on a mountaintop high above the east bank of the Rhine across from the town of Koblenz, where on Christmas Eve three thousand men filled the snowy parade grounds below a giant fir tree glistening with colored lights.

  Home in Virginia between world wars, Tavenner furthered the family traditions in apple orchard cultivation, law, and Democratic Party politics. He proved better at the first two than the last. In 1932 he tried to secure the Democratic nomination for Congress in his district but lost out to another member of the Byrd machine, Absalom Willis Robertson (the father of evangelist Pat Robertson). Six years later Byrd and his Virginia Senate colleague, Carter Glass, tried to get Tavenner appointed to a judgeship on the U.S. District Court, but that effort was foiled by President Roosevelt, who was feuding with them over their opposition to New Deal policies. FDR called Glass “an unreconstructed rebel” and said he might just as soon consult with “Nancy Astor, the Duchess of Windsor . . . [or] a Virginia moonshiner” as with the state’s two obstinate senators. Eighteen months later Tavenner was finally rewarded for his legal skills and political loy
alty when he was appointed U.S. attorney in the western district of Virginia, a job he held until getting sent to Tokyo.

  * * *

  THE AMERICAN LAWYERS at Matsui House assumed that Keenan’s departure from Tokyo would be brief, but he ended up being in the States nearly as often as in Japan for the duration of the tribunal proceedings.

  On March 28, 1947, about a year after Tavenner arrived, he received a letter from Keenan explaining his situation. Writing from Washington, Keenan said that he had returned from the hospital only the day before “after undergoing a serious operation for which I had to prepare for many weeks preceding.” Since his return to the States, he had been to three hospitals and was in no condition until after the operation to send any detailed instructions to the Tokyo staff. In his absence, there had been an internal dispute over assignments, but Keenan wanted to make it clear that he wanted Tavenner to be in charge of both preparation of the cases and the courtroom presentations. “Any long, protracted proceedings such as this trial, where men are away from home for a long period of time, are bound to bring about considerable differences of views and perhaps exhibitions of temperament,” Keenan wrote. “I know, however, Frank, that you have excellent judgment and a fine sense of fairness and you have given so generously of your efforts at this trial that you are well equipped to make such decisions that are necessary.” Which was a way of saying Tavenner, you handle it.