The Press: The Pearl Harbor Story

In the Senate caucus room, clouds of tobacco smoke curled up through the hard glare of the Klieg lights, staining the air blue. The 100 newspapermen, jammed shoulder-to-shoulder at press tables that boxed the witnesses in on three sides, like a symphony orchestra around its conductor, scribbled amid a litter of handouts, maps, yellow copy paper, overflowing ashtrays. Under the tables their shifting feet smudged their piled-up coats and hats. Off to one side were 18 radio reporters sitting along the wall; behind them were the newsreel boys, their cameras whirring monotonously.

Over four crowded wires from the Sen ate Office Building, Western Union punched 25,000 words a day; the press as sociations (A.P., U.P., I.N.S.) filed six to eight thousand apiece. How many words poured into the radio microphones, no body stopped to count. Pearl Harbor was the biggest running congressional story since the 1933 Pecora banking investiga tion.

What Paper Do You Read? The quality of this extravagant coverage was something else. The painful Pearl Harbor story was confused at best. It was com plicated by contradiction, by varying recol lections and by bitter bouts of political swordplay. Most of the reporters strove to tell it coherently. But a sizable portion of the U.S. press did little to untangle the story for the man who knew only what he read in the papers.

Day by day, in the headlines and news accounts and signed columns, different bits of testimony were played up, tailored to fit old prejudices. In Marshall Field’s leftist PM, the whole inquiry was treated as a mere smear—as if no one cared to know what had happened at Pearl Harbor. To people who read John O’Donnell’s poison penmanship in the Roosevelt-hating New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald, it was a war criminal trial, with Franklin Roosevelt, the culprit, tried and convicted daily. Sample O’Donnell: “One becomes appalled and frightened at the one-man, all-out ignorance and mental arrogance of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt. . . . The evidence builds up to the simple brutal fact that F.D.R., the Big Brain, through blind stupidity . . . was directly and personally responsible for the blood and disaster. . . .”

It’s Gotta Be This or That. Hearst trotted out veteran Pamphleteer John T. Flynn (Country Squire in the White House) for more of the same: “The late President kept his commanders in a state of mystification and apprehension as he played with the great game of war behind their backs.”

The headlines of rival papers played a game of ’tis-’tain’t. One day last week Hearst’s New York Journal-American proclaimed: SAY HULL EDICT DECIDED JAPS

TO OPEN WAR. Same afternoon, the New Dealing New York Post saw it just the other way: JAP WAR PLANS SET BEFORE TALKS.

Side by side, on Page One of the Hearst press, one story had Churchill trying to keep the U.S. out of war, and a John T. Flynn piece saying that Churchill and Roosevelt had conspired to get the U.S. in. Manhattan dailies could not agree whether the Jap codes gave us a nine-day tipoff on Pearl Harbor (Daily News), 15 days (Mirror), or six months (Times).

When Admiral Leahy was called to add to the testimony of Admiral Richardson on keeping the fleet at Pearl Harbor, the headline in the Chicago Tribune said that he “forgets,” in the New York Sun that he “denies,” in the Philadelphia Record that he “doubts” and in PM that he “verifies” what Admiral Richardson said.

The confusion at Pearl Harbor was being confounded in the U.S. press last week.