As PFC Bradley Manning goes on trial this week for providing war secrets to Wikileaks, the case I keep thinking of is from World War II. It involved the disclosure of one of our most sensitive secrets, the fact that we had cracked the Japanese code.
The story was broken by reporter Stanley Johnston of the Chicago Tribune, who’d just reached San Francisco from the Pacific.
When he called his editor to announce that he had a great story, he was told to send it in. Johnston refused. He would have to go through Navy censorship, he told his editor, and he wasn’t taking any chances. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been, nor what ship, nor how I got back,” he warned his editor.
His editor, J. Loy Maloney, had read vague reports from the Pacific. He guessed immediately that Johnson had come from the Coral Sea. It’s hard to imagine today, but the fate of the world was being decided in vast battles that the public didn’t yet know about.
The editor’s big fear was that Johnston would stop to see his wife in San Francisco. So he raced someone to intercept the reporter to make sure he cabled a copy of the story to Chicago. Johnston again refused, saying, “I can’t put it on an open wire.”
So the Tribune ordered Johnston to come himself to Chicago, where he was put in an office just off the news floor.
In the midst of this, the Navy put out a communique from Honolulu of another big battle, which ran in the Tribune under the headline: “JAPS REPULSED AT MIDWAY.”
Maloney’s mania for details grew “frantic,” as Lloyd Wendt tells the story in his history of the Tribune. It turned out that what Johnston had was a first-hand account of the Battle of the Coral Sea, including the sinking of a US aircraft carrier, the Lexington.
The editor called it the best story of the whole war, but the paper had to wait for clearance from Navy censors. Meantime, Johnston wrote a sidebar, that, when the censors let the presses roll, ran under the headline: “NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA.” The secret that we’d broken the Japanese code was tucked into the big second-day story of Midway.
A tumult erupted in Washington, compounded by the fact that Navy Secretary Frank Knox had been the publisher of the Tribune’s competitor, the Chicago Daily News.
At first, a Navy board of inquiry accepted the Trib’s explanation. But a criminal prosecution was ordered at the political level within the Roosevelt administration.
Rep. Elmer Holland (D-Pa.) questioned the Tribune’s patriotism. The paper and its allies, he railed, were “consciously or unconsciously under Hitler’s orders” and “working to defeat the United States.”
The editor brushed aside lawyers and, with his reporter in tow, barged in on the federal prosecutor and demanded to be put in front of the grand jury — which heard the newspapermen in secret, then refused to indict. “US JURY CLEARS TRIBUNE” was the paper’s headline.
The paper’s proprietor, Robert “Colonel” McCormick, declared, “Our whole effort is to win the war.”
Who can imagine such a statement coming from Wikileaks today? Who can imagine that its aim is to win the war? Who can imagine its inventor, Julian Assange, now holed up in an embassy of Ecuador, demanding to be heard by a grand jury?
Some will suggest that World War II was just a different time. Our greatest reporters, like Stanley Johnston, feared the open wire. Even the administration’s fiercest critics — and the Tribune was certainly one of them — bowed to an old-fashioned patriotism.
The stakes in the war today are as high as the stakes in World War II, but back then everyone, including the press, seemed to have humility and seriousness — and an unalloyed honor.
Loy Maloney and Stanley Johnston could have gone to jail, just like Julian Assange fears, but they refused to hide.