The Press: Mystery in Chicago

The city room of the Chicago Tribune was tense. In the smoke-coated old Federal Building a mile away in the Loop a Tribune man waited for the flash. Then it came. U.S. District Attorney J. Albert Woll handed reporters a statement by Special Prosecutor William D. Mitchell:

“The grand jury considering the matter of the publication on June 7 in the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers of an article relating to the Japanese fleet in the Midway battle has decided that no indictment should be returned. … Its conclusion that no violation of law was disclosed settles the matter.”

The Tribune city room all but forgot its deadlines. When tall, black-moustached Reporter Stanley Johnston, author of the June 7 story, walked in, the staff rose and cheered. It cheered again at the entrance of balding little Managing Editor James Loy (“Pat”) Maloney. Then Colonel Robert R. McCormick appeared at the door, statement in hand. As one man, the whole room roared. The colonel blinked and said: “There never has been a bunch like the Tribune bunch. As I have told you before, every member of the Tribune is a member of my family.”

That day, in the page-one space usually occupied by its cartoon, the Tribune displayed under the caption “The Citadel” a picture of Tribune Tower with the U.S. flag waving above it.

Thus ended one of the strangest episodes in the strange career of World War II censorship. If it was true, as the Tribune said in its story, that the information about the Japanese dispositions came from naval intelligence, the story may have given away a Navy secret. But the jury apparently accepted the explanation of Editor Maloney and Reporter Johnston that they had doped out the whole story in the Tribune office.

Strangest was the Government’s procedure from beginning to end. Ordinarily no very conclusive evidence is needed to secure an indictment. If the Government’s case was so weak that an indictment was not likely, why had it raised the issue? Why had it publicized its intention by an advance announcement (TIME, Aug. 17)? Why had former Attorney General Mitchell, who conducted the investigation with scrupulous fairness, allowed Maloney and Johnston the unusual privilege of appearing to make a defense? If the Government was leaning over backwards to be fair to an anti-Administration paper, why did it attempt to prosecute? And if its case was not shaky, what happened? Answers to these questions will be heard after the war.

The Chicago Times speculated:

“If anyone in our naval intelligence had disclosed the make-up of the Japanese attacking force, which presumably our profound scholars in Washington cubbyholes had identified by deciphering the secret Japanese code, there would have been a violation of the Espionage Act. … Of course the Japs would immediately change their code and that would hinder our war effort and endanger our fighters until we cracked their new code.”