John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President
[The recent remarks of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have triggered a political media firestorm regarding the Vietnam War record of Sen. John McCain, resulting in a surge of renewed traffic to my "Tokyo Rose" piece, which I am now republishing below.
An even greater flood of attention has gone to Sydney Schanberg's original 8,000 word article, which I had published as a cover story for The American Conservative several years ago. I urge people to read that remarkable expose.
As a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times, there are few living Americans who can match Schanberg's journalistic authority in this subject, and the fact that our entire American media has spent years entirely ignoring the explosive and massively-documented charges of one of its most distinguished members demonstrates to all of us that we are indeed living in the world of "American Pravda." I also include a link to my own discussion of Schanberg's remarkable findings]
Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.
The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.
Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.
The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD. ...
My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague. ...
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