Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

Dear Mother and Father, whatever happens to me, always remember that I love you more than anything in the world. May God protect you, my loved ones, until we see each other again, wherever that may be.

Love, your son, Herbie.

Washington, D.C., Jail

Saturday, August 8, 1942

3:30 P.M.

Guards strapped Herbie Haupt’s hands and feet to the electric chair and attached electrodes to his head and leg. A switch was flipped. His body tightened, trembled, and, sixty seconds later, relaxed.

Washington, D.C., Jail

Wednesday, August 12, 1942

When FBI agent Duane Traynor walked into George’s cell, he saw a thinning, pale man—a shell of the excitable and talkative optimist he’d met a month earlier.

For a moment George’s eyes sparkled at the sight of the confidant he had once trusted, the partner he had once believed to be his friend. They’ve finally come to let me out .

Those sparkles turned to tears when he realized that Traynor was only there to say good-bye.

New Hampshire

August–October 1942

The Supreme Court’s decision had been announced in July, but the more complicated task of explaining in a written opinion why the president had not violated the Constitution still lay ahead. It would not suffice to simply quote the old Latin maxim Inter Arma Silent Leges : In a time of war, the laws are silent.

Alone at his summer home in New Hampshire, Chief Justice Harlan Stone was rereading the attorney general’s legal brief. He was searching for sound legal reasoning to support the court’s decision. But Stone wasn’t finding what he wanted. “I certainly hope,” he told his clerk, “the military is better equipped to fight the war than it is to fight its legal battles.”

Finally, though regretting that “the opinion was not good literature,” Stone sent a draft to his colleagues, who unanimously signed onto it.

But what other choice did they have? By then, four of the justices had doubts about their decision, but six men had already been executed as a result of it.

Atlanta

Wednesday, November 3, 1943

The psychiatrist typed his report slowly. “The prisoner has an obsessive, compulsive, neurotic personality type. He complains of depressive trends, nervousness, insomnia, and vague pains. He repeatedly stated that he did not mind being in prison but that he was hurt by the way it was done; that he has terrific prejudice and anger and that he feels he cannot go on long this way.”

A few miles away, the prisoner—the one with a silver streak running through his black hair—wept quietly to himself.

Washington, D.C.

December 1971

J. Edgar Hoover sat down at the large desk in his dark office. It was just over a week before Christmas, his fifty-second at the FBI. It would be his last.

On his desk were two stacks of Christmas cards, one with the notes he would read, and one, a much larger stack, with the notes his secretary assured him he could ignore.

Near the bottom of the larger stack was a holiday card that had come virtually every year since 1948, when Peter Burger and George Dasch were granted executive clemency by President Harry Truman and deported back to Germany.

“Merry Christmas,” it said. “Yours, Peter Burger.”

EPILOGUE

2001–2004

Just a few months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, a twenty-year-old American citizen named Yasir Hamdi ran away from home. A devout Muslim, he had been told wonderful things about the Taliban from his friends and religious leaders, but when he’d arrived at a Taliban training camp in Afghanistan that summer, he quickly realized it had all been lies. He soon became disillusioned and, after just a few weeks, left the camp.

On his way home, Hamdi was arrested by Afghan warlords, who told their American allies that he was a Taliban fighter. The American military labeled Yasir Hamdi an unlawful enemy combatant and detained him: first in Afghanistan, then in Guantanamo Bay, next in Norfolk, Virginia, and finally on a naval base off the coast of South Carolina.

Hamdi told his captors that he was not an enemy of the United States and believed that a trial would exonerate him. For years the United States held him without charge, arguing that, as an enemy combatant, he was not entitled to due process.

Finally, in 2004, his case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, where his attorney argued that, as a U.S. citizen, his right to a jury trial was guaranteed by the Constitution.

The government’s case was made by the Solicitor General of the United States. He reminded the justices of an obscure legal precedent decided in 1942, when eight Nazi saboteurs had tried to make a similar argument. The government’s brief was forty-one pages long and referred to the saboteurs’ case thirty times.

In 2004, not many people seemed to care that the 1942 decision had been made hastily in the midst of a world war, or that four of the justices regretted their decision before the official opinion had even been released. It didn’t matter because the passage of time destroys context and circumstance the way termites destroy wood: slowly, steadily, and completely.

Yasir Hamdi, thanks in large part to a decision made sixty years earlier, lost his case. He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported to Saudi Arabia in 2004.

9

Who Is Tokyo Rose?

San Francisco, California

July 6, 1949

The courtroom was a marble masterpiece. It covered the walls, the floor, and the round columns that stretched the length of its preposterously tall ceiling. Plump cherubim stared down from the tops of those columns and a gaudy mosaic behind the judge’s desk faced enormous, gilded doors.

Under dim lights that did little to brighten the solemn and austere setting, the only empty seat belonged to Thomas DeWolfe, the tall, balding special prosecutor. As he began his opening statement, he could feel the eyes of the judge, jurors, lawyers, and all 110 spectators boring into him. He could also feel the eyes of the defendant, a plain-faced, simply dressed, thirty-three-year-old woman on trial for treason against the United States of America.

DeWolfe’s voice was strong and confident and echoed off the marble, giving it a larger-than-life feel. “We will show,” he said, “that in one broadcast after the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the defendant told American troops: ‘Now, you boys really have lost all your ships. You really are orphans now. How do you think you will ever get home?’ ”

DeWolfe spoke slowly and methodically, in keeping with his personality. The middle-aged lawyer’s style was as modest as the room he worked in was ornate. DeWolfe rarely took time away from work, and on the rare occasions he did take a vacation, he preferred to be alone. His work was his life, and his trial skills were second to none. What Thomas DeWolfe lacked in charisma he more than made up for with clarity and credibility.

“We will show that the defendant told American troops that their wives and sweethearts were unfaithful,” he continued. “That they were out with shipyard workers with wallets bulging with money. That she told them to lay down their arms. And that the Japanese would never give up and had the will to win.”

DeWolfe paused to look at the defendant. Her tan plaid suit was old and out of style. Her face was pale and expressionless. He wondered if the jury would ever believe that the petite woman before them was the infamous Tokyo Rose. She didn’t look much like the woman whose seductive voice had been broadcast by Radio Tokyo all across the Pacific, hypnotizing the minds of Allied troops with Japanese propaganda, making them homesick, telling them that defeat was inevitable, and sometimes driving them to desertion or suicide.

“We will show that she talked about the mosquitoes and the jungles, and when she heard some troops were short of food, she told them they should go home where they could get steak and French-fried potatoes.”