On June 7, 1942, six months to the day after Pearl Harbor, Chicago awoke to a startling banner atop that day’s Tribune:
The U.S. Navy had ambushed a Japanese strike force near Midway Island. That tiny atoll halfway between Asia and North America occupied a mere 2.4 square miles, but was to be the first steppingstone on Tokyo’s path to capture and occupy the Hawaiian Islands. The Battle of Midway would be scored as one of World War II’s most crucial victories, in part because the devastated Japanese fleet never fully recovered from its enormous losses. Some scholars rate Midway as Japan’s greatest naval defeat in more than three centuries.
Beneath the main headline was an astonishing Tribune scoop: The U.S. Navy had known when the huge Japanese armada would be where, and with what assets — four aircraft carriers, two battleships and a huge flock of support ships. That report, a mere dozen paragraphs, provoked a furious reaction in Washington; President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first instinct was to dispatch Marines to occupy Tribune Tower.
Every dispute over government secrets has to be judged on its merits. Each case broaches the tension between Washington’s desire to manage information and Americans’ right to know of their leaders’ triumphs and blunders. Whenever the federal government positions its considerable resources against a Bradley Manning, or an Edward Snowden, or a cluster of reporters for The Associated Press, all of us need to parse the facts before we leap to conclusions that official Washington is, or isn’t, in the right.
Newly disclosed government documents on the Battle of Midway case, with its federal attempt to prosecute the Tribune and at least two of its journalists, point to a conclusion worth storing away for future secrets cases:
We now know that government officials evidently realized they didn’t have a good legal case against this newspaper — but cynically figured they might be able to win convictions by playing on patriotic jurors’ emotions during wartime.
The Tribune’s scoop was crucial because of what savvy readers saw between its lines: Such detailed descriptions of Japan’s plans, movements and even specific ships — the most important identified by name — had to mean the U.S. somehow had broken the Imperial Japanese Navy’s secret code.
Tribune war correspondent Stanley Johnston didn’t explicitly mention the Americans’ code-breaking success. Nor did he offer clues to how he had learned of it. Historians have debated his source; at first Tribune editors attributed the article’s detail to Johnston’s genuinely encyclopedic knowledge of warships.
But evidence amassed by Richard Norton Smith for “The Colonel,” his 1997 biography of the late Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick, is convincing: Johnston, a dashing Australian who had returned to Chicago June 5 after traveling with the U.S. Pacific fleet, surely had been aided by Morton Seligman, a U.S. naval commander. Seligman would have been an appreciative source: One month earlier, during the similarly vicious Battle of the Coral Sea, Johnston had hustled below deck to rescue badly burned sailors on Seligman’s sinking aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington.
Smith reports that on June 7, as an apoplectic Admiral Ernest King, the Navy’s commander-in-chief, awakened to Johnston’s scoop, King had on his desk a draft citation praising Johnston for his heroism aboard the Lexington. By nightfall Navy censors had amended their rules to forbid the publishing of enemy movements — a tacit admission that the Tribune had broken no law or regulation. By the morning of June 8, Johnston was in King’s Washington office, facing a flotilla of naval investigators. Johnston acknowledged seeing notes about the Japanese fleet aboard a U.S. ship, but said it was material he already had learned.
Navy Secretary Frank Knox, ex-publisher of the Chicago Daily News and a foe of the Tribune’s McCormick, demanded that U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle seek indictments against Tribune journalists for harming national defense. The 71-year-old documents released late last month by the U.S. Department of Justice disclose discussions among Biddle’s staff over whether to prosecute.
Solicitor General Oscar Cox wrote that while “It is hard to believe that any judge or jury would take a sympathetic view of (Johnston’s) case,” it would be hard to prove Johnston intended to aid the enemy and thus should be executed. Cox said Justice could pursue Johnston’s editor and publisher. If an editor had told Johnston to take or copy secret documents, the editor “might perhaps be indicted for conspiracy,” Cox wrote, adding that “if he can be convicted, so can the company.”
William Mitchell, a former attorney general recruited as special prosecutor, investigated but concluded that the government couldn’t prove “willful intent” and should drop the matter. Biddle agreed. But Roosevelt, who loathed McCormick, pressed his attorney general, and Biddle caved. As Smith tells it, “On Aug. 7, much to the surprise of the censors who had cleared the Tribune two months before, Mitchell announced plans to convene a Chicago grand jury” to pursue Johnston, managing editor J. Loy Maloney and the Tribune itself. The newspaper’s Aug. 9 retort: ‘We have said and proved that we cannot be intimidated and now, once again, we are going to prove it.”
Unfortunately for Mitchell, the Navy declined to talk about the Japanese code, or to allege any harm the story had caused. Grand jurors learned that other papers had published the same story — and, stunningly, that the Washington Times-Herald independently had been tipped about the impending Japanese attack from … a top official of the government’s office of war censorship, chatting over an unsecured phone line. As the grand jury foreman, Joliet upholsterer John Holmes, skeptically probed intricacies of the censorship system, Smith writes, prosecutor Mitchell knew his case was in ruins.
On Aug. 19, Holmes’ grand jury rejected all charges against the journalists and their newspaper. Footnote to history: In 1955, Johnston and his wife, Barbara, attended McCormick at his deathbed, Smith writes, “and it was Stanley Johnston who dressed the shrunken corpse in McCormick’s World War I uniform, which had to be folded over his back.”
The players are gone. The saga endures.
So forgive us if we at the Tribune respond to cases that involve government secrets not with snap judgments, but with long lists of questions. Our predecessors knew what it was to have the full force of the federal government, from the White House on down, try to punish this news organization for publishing information it held, in a manner that did no harm.
Some secrets cases embarrass public officials — and amount to nothing more.
