American History Revised (9 page)

You don’t want to run into this submarine on a moonlit night: the
1-58

Clearly, the Navy had a lot of explaining to do. Why no escort? Why no warning of
the known danger in the Philippine Sea? Why continued radio silence? Why no notification to the port commanders of two ports? Why no follow-up when the ship failed to show up for four and a half days? The only response the Navy could come up with, as all bureaucracies are wont to do in the glare of bright lights shone on their ineptitude, was to go after an individual, in this case the ship’s much-decorated captain. A court-martial of the captain would take the heat off the Navy. The Navy pressed two charges against Captain Charles McVay: first, failure to exercise proper caution in a war zone—i.e., failure to zigzag, and, second, failure to give adequate prompt warning to the crew to abandon ship. On the second charge, McVay’s lawyers pointed out that there could be no shipwide emergency order via intercom because the torpedoes had knocked out the ship’s entire electrical system. On this second charge, McVay was acquitted. On the first charge, the Navy prosecutors withheld information from the defense that might have exculpated McVay: the Navy’s knowledge of Japanese submarines in the area. The prosecutors then pulled a stunt never tried before: it brought over from Japan a surprise witness: the
I-58’s
commander, Mochitsura Hashimoto. Many Americans and congressmen were outraged: How dare the Navy let one of its officers possibly be convicted because of the testimony of an enemy? Little did the prosecutors realize they had a wild card on their hands: Hashimoto, clearly uncomfortable in this situation, defended McVay. He testified that the clouds had cleared suddenly and it was such a moonlit night he easily could have nailed the
Indianapolis
whether it zigzagged or not. Samuel Eliot Morison, author of the official six-volume history of U.S. naval operations in the Second World War, agreed: “Only a fool could have missed at this short range,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, the military tribunal found McVay guilty of not zigzagging. McVay’s crew, almost to a man, defended him. To Morison, it all reminded him of the 1757 English trial and execution of one of its admirals, described by Voltaire in
Candide:
“It is found good, from time to time, to kill one admiral to encourage the others.”

The charade continued. The pilot who had arrived to drop life rafts for the
Indianapolis
survivors bobbing in the ocean was a man of extraordinary courage. He was Lieutenant Adrian Marks. Violating standing orders never to land his amphibious plane in open sea, Marks managed to bring his plane down amid twelve-foot swells, take on board as many men as he could, then add more men by securing them to the wings with parachute cord. Barely managing to keep the overloaded plane afloat until a rescue ship arrived at nightfall, he saved the lives of fifty-six men. The Navy bureaucracy, however, was more concerned about the loss of one of its seaplanes. It commenced court-martial proceedings against Marks, until higher-ups put a stop to this and gave him
a medal for one of the most heroic acts of the entire war.

1953
The Cold War witnessed powerful antagonisms between the United States and the two Communist superpowers, China and Russia. Here are some fascinating might-have-beens:

Two revolutionaries sent a secret message, offering to come to Washington to talk to President Franklin Roosevelt. They were Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, then in the throes of a great struggle with Chiang Kai-shek for control of the world’s largest nation. FDR, preoccupied with other things, refused to see them. Acting on the advice of a political crony in China and against his two senior State Department officers (John Davies and John Service), Roosevelt cast his lot with the side that turned out to be the loser, Chiang Kai-shek.

Shortly after he became president, Richard Nixon contemplated opening relations with China, the Communist superpower and ally of North Vietnam, with whom the U.S. was then at war. He consulted with Asian specialists in the State Department and academia; virtually all of them told him to forget it, that nothing could be done until after the Vietnam War was over. But Nixon disagreed and plunged ahead.

“Nixon put himself in Mao’s shoes,” said former diplomat James C. Humes. “He sensed that the Communist leader might not be too happy about North Vietnam expanding its military might into Southeast Asia, with inroads into Laos and Cambodia. How would the United States react, Nixon thought, if Mexico were taking over the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador?” By appreciating his enemy’s self-interest, Nixon was able to establish common ground and achieve a diplomatic breakthrough. Adds historian Barbara Tuchman, “Twenty-seven years, two wars, and
x
million lives later, after immeasurable harm wrought by the mutual suspicion and phobia of two great powers not on speaking terms, an American President, reversing the unmade journey of 1945, has traveled to Peking to meet with the same two Chinese leaders. Might the interim have been otherwise?”

No one would accuse Winston Churchill, author of the mighty phrase “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” of being soft on communism. Yet when Stalin died in 1953 and the new Soviet leaders signaled interest in the relaxation of tensions, Churchill was interested. “A new hope has been created in the unhappy, bewildered world,” he wrote Eisenhower. Eisenhower, however, was not interested. At a conference in Bermuda, the American president told off the British prime minister in no uncertain terms: “Russia was a
woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present ‘beat’ into the back streets.” Against Churchill’s advice, Eisenhower refused the Russian overtures, appointed as his secretary of state “the high priest of the Cold War,” John Foster Dulles, took a soft line against the McCarthy outrages, and preached concepts of peace that included “going to the brink” and “massive retaliation.”

In 1962 the U.S. got into a showdown with Russia over nuclear missiles in Cuba, America’s backyard. Yet Cuba was supposed to have been an American colony, not once but twice. Back in the late 1850s, the U.S. was all set to write Spain a $50-million check for “the Pearl of the Antilles” when Congress, fearing President James Buchanan would try to divert some of the money into a personal slush fund, nixed the deal. Then, forty years later, Cuba reappeared at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The U.S. found itself with a lot of new territories: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines. Not knowing what to do with all these places, and more interested in acquiring Hawaii and building a Pacific empire, President William McKinley decided to let one of them go its own way—Cuba.

In 1963, President Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan negotiated with Khrushchev to implement a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons testing. The Russians wanted to allow only three annual on-site inspections, the minimum number technically necessary. The British agreed. The U.S. Joint Chiefs, however, insisted on twenty. President Kennedy got that number down to seven, but the Russians would not go along with what almost everyone agreed was unnecessary snooping, and so the effort had to be abandoned. The result was an arms race of expensive new generations of multi-warhead nuclear weapons.

1963, 2001
The “tipping point” is a concept used to describe a pivotal turning point at a moment when events could have gone one way or another. Dramatic events like Pearl Harbor or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are obvious “tipping points.”

But sometimes tipping points are not so obvious. In two cases when America embarked on a drawn-out war fraught with unintended consequences—Vietnam and Iraq—the decision to go to war was made in a flash, on the spur of the moment when America was under attack.

Vietnam was getting to be a problem. In early 1963, JFK told Senator Mike Mansfield,
“If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected.” (Similar statements were made to Senator Wayne Morse and to presidential aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Michael Forrestal.) At a September 12 press conference he claimed his policy was “simple” and listed three objectives: win the war, contain the Communists, and bring the Americans home. But after getting battlefield reports from Vietnam that things were going much worse than anticipated, he shifted his thinking dramatically. At a November 12 press conference, he dropped the “winning the war” entirely and made “bringing the boys home” number one: “Now, that is our object, to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate.” Accordingly he signed an executive order, National Security Agency Memorandum (NSAM) 263, to withdraw one thousand of the sixteen thousand American combat “advisors” in Vietnam and for
all
Americans to be out of Vietnam by January 1, 1965 (i.e., in thirteen months). He had a November 24, 1963, appointment with his ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, to finalize the details of this withdrawal scheduled for December 3.

The plan never got carried out. To be sure, the thousand advisors made it home on December 3, but that was only because of bureaucratic inertia in executing changes in presidential decrees. The rest—and the 500,000 men later to serve—were not so lucky.

What happened? Two days before his meeting with Lodge, President Kennedy was assassinated. The incoming president, a man with no foreign affairs experience, announced within hours of moving into the Oval Office, “I am not going to lose Vietnam, I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” He summarily rejected Ambassador Lodge in favor of other advisors who warned that “hard decisions would have to be made if Vietnam was to be saved,” and issued NSAM 273, canceling JFK’s NSAM 263.