Courageous Ron
Unz Wonders How John McCain Gets Away With It
Courageous Ron Unz Wonders How John McCain Gets Away
With It
John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
by Ron Unz
What Was John McCain’s True Wartime Record in Vietnam?
With Sen. John McCain so much in the headlines these
days due to his harsh criticism of the foreign policy positions of Donald
Trump, a few people suggested that I republish my article from a couple of
years ago exploring McCain’s own very doubtful military record.
Given the massive media coverage of rather fanciful
allegations that the Russians are blackmailing Trump, perhaps similar resources
should be devoted to investigating a much more plausible case of blackmail, and
one that is far better documented.
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. I think he first came to my
attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open
Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the
U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media
accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a
POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with
the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo
showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months
after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about
this story or his war-hero status.
McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the
1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five
financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of
the others. Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate
of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion
of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as
much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently
favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in
the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did
surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot
at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South
Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against
him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly
scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even
included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a
“traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes
found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.
Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I
turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose
foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his
integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely
on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into
additional disastrous wars.
Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a
long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website.
Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he
instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and
broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost
incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had
absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article
on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else
be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being
thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but
the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the
matter, though without any real success.
However, those new doubts about McCain were still in
my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively
documented expose about McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater
scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by
one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former
top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading
journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his
conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while
two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee
have also strongly corroborated his account.
In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the
story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed
the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour
former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski
admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s
Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of
Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be
that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream
media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and
McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all
those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record. Our
American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.
I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself
nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering
Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly
those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our
military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the
questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article,
he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims,
partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found
it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not
attracted vastly more attention, and couldn’t understand why the media was so
uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.
He also had some very interesting things to say about
John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in
veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist
propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner
camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted
collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who
currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and
wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential
campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar
charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover
up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious
wartime broadcasts.
In late September 2008 another fascinating story
appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit
Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that
their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had
spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United
States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed
enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he
would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked
so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote
for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the
head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total
nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout
in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.
Let us consider the implications of this story.
Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very
violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem
that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see
him reach a position of supreme world power?
But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months
after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered
archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the
POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking
off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any
need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval
Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that
recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with
Nixon.
It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers
of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that
McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out,
throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the
best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist
propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as
they later claimed. Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as
Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they
are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.
I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s
earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first
person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May
1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment. The editorial introduction
notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just
out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps
drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to
Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and
remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick
prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,”
spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many
history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of
intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.
One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his
supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written
statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a
visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration
with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and
beatings, and offers of rewards.
Perhaps. But that original Counterpunch article
provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda
broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed
its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars &
Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his
imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the
rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable
that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military
publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial,
and frequent as his critics allege.
When I later discussed these troubling matters with an
eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he
emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his
father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American
forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the
alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird
Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons
both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for
John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had
his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the
war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few
years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable
service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of
inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with
its hundreds of dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some
powerful political chits he could call in.
Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture
make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly
broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there
would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these
tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the
hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting
this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then
promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile
victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by
the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.
Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our
foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his
propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men
had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s
highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the
media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there
would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them
dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important
patriotic narrative. Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a
decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his
campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible
rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”
And so the legend grew over the decades until it
completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war
hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda
broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes
noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally
invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over
time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself
is nearly forgotten. The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was
his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack
Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may
still lose an election.
I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the
Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive
research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this
troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s
war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more
thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover
up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly
conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of
McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not.
However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with
Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the
Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.
John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic
Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards
been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as
McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that
conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner
Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in
1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.
His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism
suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word
expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II
television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence
persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a
dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being
witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that
somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year though
certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific
accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as
near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.
As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey
had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once friendly
New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media
sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have
had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New
York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he
held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to
recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled
left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a
2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream
media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning
Kerrey’s activities, just as the media has also totally ignored all of
Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have
almost totally vanished from public consciousness.
The realization that many of our political leaders may
be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets
regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the
particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to
suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make
their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of
personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.
Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who
spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI.
Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of
prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly
sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal
political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile,
he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely
believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and
there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a
possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep
personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized
crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate
significant FBI resources to combat it.
Today when we consider the major countries of the
world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in
actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top
Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America
and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case,
with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their
popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may
eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme
example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire
national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the
result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic
collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is
the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon
outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of
minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that
they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges
buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought
independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career
move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some
monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up
in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political
rise.
Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step
back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual
came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of
his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually
the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close
of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no
parallel examples come to mind.
Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely
lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs,
their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that
is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the
possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected
president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had
taken a very peculiar turn.
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