The Press: Navy v. Tribune

The Chicago Tribune was in the hottest spot in many a year. A Federal grand jury in Chicago this week begins to investigate a Government charge that the Tribune, in a story on the Battle of Midway, published information that might be useful to the enemy.

Newsmen in Washington had known about the case for weeks (but had been requested not to report it). The Tribune’s story—date-lined “Washington” and published on June 7—declared that the Navy had known about the Japanese plans for the attack on Midway. It backed up the assertion by giving detailed disposition of the Japanese fleet in three attacking forces.

Obviously the Tribune gave away no secret in letting the Japs know the disposition of their own fleet. Just what secret had been given away, the Government did not say, even though scores of people n Washington had a good idea what it was. Last week the Tribune published a nine-column defense of itself which revealed some of the testimony brought out earlier at a Navy investigation: the Washington date line on the story was phony. It originated in Chicago and was credited to Stanley Johnston, a garrulous, black-mustachioed, Australian-born opportunist who had served in the Australian Army in World War I, knocked around Europe and the Orient for 20 years, worked for the Tribune’s London bureau. He came to the U.S. after the fall of France, married a former showgirl (whom he had met in Paris), and became a U.S. citizen. Johnston had recently returned from the Pacific where he had happened to be the only correspondent on the Lexington, and was able to take pictures of her as she sank in the Coral Sea. His stories of the battle, whipped into shape by a rewrite man, installed him as a McCormick favorite.

He was in the office of Tribune Managing Editor James Loy Maloney the night (June 6) when the Navy’s first communiqué on the Battle of Midway came in. Editor Maloney is said to have humphed that the Navy was trying to balloon a skirmish into a big battle, proposed to put the story on an inside page. Reporter Johnston protested that it was one of the biggest naval battles in history. He laid before Editor Maloney a list of Japanese ships, gave him a description of the Japanese battle strategy. So Maloney put the story on page one.

According to the Tribune, Johnston made up his list of the Jap fleet and its disposition out of “his own expert knowledge,” from “discussions with naval men of all countries” and by studying Jane’s Fighting Ships. Editor Maloney said the story’s assertion that the information was known by Naval Intelligence was just an assumption.* Johnston said that he guessed that the Navy had spotted the approaching ships by plane and submarine reconnaissance.

“Every one of them?” he was asked. Said Johnston: “I see no reason why not.”

As the Tribune pointed out last week, Stanley Johnston had been recommended for a citation for bravery in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and Managing Editor Maloney had been a U.S. flyer in World War I, serving in Eddie Rickenbacker’s squadron in France. At worst it looked as if they had committed a blunder in failing to take into account what such a story might reveal.

Several papers which published the Tribune story may be indicted, including the papers of Colonel McCormick’s cousins—Cissie Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald and Captain Joe Patterson’s New York Daily News. Ironically, one paper which published the story (in one edition) was the San Francisco Chronicle, whose editor is Paul C. Smith, now on leave in the Navy’s press bureau.

So far there was nothing to show that Publisher McCormick had any knowledge of the Tribune story before it was printed, or that his well-known isolationism and his feud with the Administration had anything to do with the publication of the story. To try to keep the issue politically clean Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that William D. Mitchell, Herbert Hoover’s Attorney General, would present the case for the Government.

Colonel McCormick, as always, reacted vigorously. The Tribune unfurled the U.S. flag (in color) on page one. Cried Colonel McCormick, dragging a red herring across the trail: “The attack on the Tribune is now in the open. An Administration which for years has been seeking by one sly means or another . . . to intimidate this newspaper has finally despaired of all other means and is now preparing criminal prosecutions.”

It looked very much as if Publisher McCormick might make the public believe that he was being persecuted unless the Government, would loosen up enough to tell what real damage the Tribune story had done.

* Said the Chicago Sun: “In other words, being on the horns of a dilemma, the Tribune finds the horn of fakery less sharp than the horn of espionage.”