The Press: The Colonel in Tokyo

Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick is no man to let others transact his important business. When Publisher McCormick decided to go to Tokyo, politicos guessed that General Douglas MacArthur was to be measured for a presidential toga. The Colonel kept in close touch with his Chicago Tribune readers, as usual.

The Rockies gave the Colonel his first idea. As soon as he landed in San Francisco, he telegraphed the Trib: “When the brass ceases preparing for the last war, it will find these mountain tops excellent places for antiaircraft artillery. . . . They will produce surprise fire on the invader. With air shelters for our people, mountain top . . . artillery and a superior air force, we can, as always, defy the world.”

Last week, he sent back his first impressions from Tokyo: “The Japanese here are considerably smaller than [Nisei]. One wonders that their war lords ventured to pit them against the Americans . . . until he remembers how they defeated the Russians, Germans, English, French, Dutch and Australians. . . .” The Colonel was pleased by the bearing of U.S. occupation troops: “I feel that America . . . will not be defeated … by our anti-American representatives at Lake Success.”

His old friend General MacArthur, whom McCormick had known well in World War I, gave him the most lavish reception ever accorded an unofficial visitor. General MacArthur lent him his private Cadillac, dined with him twice. McCormick assured U.S. newsmen that they had avoided politics. He brushed off talk of the MacArthur-for-President drive and repeated his endorsement of Senator Taft.

But if Taft didn’t make the grade, he knew “no better man than Douglas Mac-Arthur.”*

The Colonel lunched with Prime Minister Tetsu Katayama and his Cabinet, and received a lapel pin—a silver chrysanthemum. He made Japanese front pages by saying (as Japanese jingoes had said before) that Japan was overpopulated, and that Australia was just the place to relieve the “pressure.”

Then Colonel McCormick gave a lecture to the Tokyo Correspondents’ Club. Subject: the history of the Hudson’s Bay Co. Before leaving Tokyo for home, he took a walk with Emperor Hirohito amid the 700-year-old dwarf trees in his garden. Reported the Colonel, whose occasional sarcasm and constant, majestic deadpan sometimes pass muster for a sense of humor: “The Emperor said he hoped in the future the relations between Japan and the U.S. would be as warm as they have been in the past.”

* Japanese press references to McCormick’s remarks were killed by MacArthur censors. They passed a frontpage, column story in the Nippon Times, quoting Milwaukee’s Lansing Hoyt, self-appointed MacArthur campaign boss: “I am able to say with the certainty of personal knowledge that General MacArthur will accept the Republican nomination. …”