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

Cynicism did not suit Iva well, but she’d come a long way since she’d accepted that interview with Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge three years earlier. She knew that if she’d been less naïve back then, she would probably be back at home in Los Angeles right now nursing her and Phil’s first child.

Instead, she lay in her bed in Tokyo, her husband holding her tight as her body shook and heaved uncontrollably.

Their baby had died that morning.

Washington, D.C.

May 25, 1948

Thomas DeWolfe sat at his small desk, dictating a memo to the unluckiest secretary at the Department of Justice. She was the only assistant in the building still working this late at night and DeWolfe was, as usual, the only attorney.

DeWolfe knew his bosses, especially Attorney General Tom Clark, did not want to hear what this memo had to say: Iva Toguri was innocent.

That same conclusion had been reached almost two years earlier by lots of others, including the Counter Intelligence Corps’s legal section, its intelligence division, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, and the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Theron L. Caudle.

After Toguri was released, the American press had gone crazy. Walter Winchell, the most powerful gossip columnist in America, waged a personal crusade against her. Furious that Iva was trying to return to the United States, Winchell labeled her a traitor in his syndicated columns, which were read by seven million Americans, as well as on his Sunday night radio broadcasts, heard by twenty million listeners. He wanted the government to re-arrest Iva and prosecute her for treason. At the very least, he wanted to make sure that Iva never set foot on American soil—unless, of course, it was in handcuffs.

“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!” he began every radio show. It was great entertainment, delivered with the panache of the vaudevillian he once was. The information that followed it, however, like the “news” in his columns, was usually wrong.

According to Winchell, the lawyers at the Justice Department who were blocking Iva Toguri’s re-arrest and prosecution were “emperor-lovers and friends of the Zaibatsu.” He also told his audience that Clark Lee had turned the original typewritten copy of Toguri’s eighteen-page confession over to FBI agents. In it, according to Winchell, she had named two witnesses against her, both of whom were available to testify if she was brought to trial.

Thomas DeWolfe knew that almost everything in Winchell’s reporting on Iva was wrong: there were no “emperor-lovers” in the Justice Department; Iva’s “confession” was nothing more than Clark Lee’s notes from his interview—where she had unequivocally denied any wrongdoing; and the “two witnesses against her” were Charles Cousens and Ted Ince. DeWolfe knew these two men would actually confirm Iva’s innocence if they were called to testify. Cousens, in fact, had written to the Justice Department saying as much.

The career federal prosecutor understood Washington well enough to know that a memo from him concluding that Iva Toguri should not be re-arrested would win him few friends in the Truman administration. But DeWolfe also knew that it was his job to tell his bosses the facts. It was their job to decide whether to listen to them.

“There is insufficient evidence to make out a prima facie case,” he dictated to his tired secretary. “Don’t forget that facie is f-a-c-i-e, and that last sentence should be in all capital letters.”

“Thank you, Mr. DeWolfe.” Debbie had worked with him for a dozen years and not once had she ever called him “Tom.”

“The government witnesses, almost to a man, will testify to facts which show that the subject was pro-American, wished to return to the United States and tried to do so prior to Pearl Harbor, attempted, again, unsuccessfully to return to the United States in 1942, and beamed to American troops only the introduction to innocuous musical recordings.”

DeWolfe had no doubt that other female disc jockeys, other “Tokyo Roses,” had broadcast propaganda that was far from innocuous. Nor did he doubt why the American government was not interested in prosecuting any of them: The press had not appointed itself as judge, jury, and executioner of those women; Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge had not labeled those women as “Tokyo Rose”; and Walter Winchell had not publicly directed his wrath and vitriol toward those women.

DeWolfe continued dictating: “The government’s evidence likewise will show that subject was a trusted and selected agent of the Allied prisoners of war, who selected her as the one they could trust not to sabotage their efforts against the success of the Japanese propaganda machine.”

When it was complete, DeWolfe’s memo totaled approximately 2,500 words. Not one of them indicated that he had any doubt about Iva Toguri’s innocence.

Washington, D.C.

August 16, 1948

The presidential election was only months away. President Truman, feeling pressure from the public over Tokyo Rose—pressure that was fueled almost daily by Walter Winchell—and sick of being labeled by the media as “soft on communism” and “soft on spies,” ordered Attorney General Tom Clark to make a case against Iva Toguri.

Clark ordered that Toguri be arrested in Japan and brought to California to stand trial for treason. He appointed Thomas DeWolfe, the government’s best trial attorney, especially when it came to cases involving treason, as her prosecutor.

San Francisco

One year later: August 12, 1949

Thomas DeWolfe was having trouble sleeping. In fact, he hadn’t slept well from the moment he gave his opening statement in United States v. Iva Toguri to the day he questioned the last of his forty-six witnesses—a period of five weeks.

He tried to pass the insomnia off as simple nervousness about the trial, but deep down he suspected it was something else: an uneasy conscience. DeWolfe knew he was a compartmentalizer, and he comforted himself in the belief that the decision to prosecute an innocent woman was not his to make. His only job was to follow orders and to give the Department of Justice his absolute best effort.

In the past five weeks, that best effort had included ensuring an all-white jury through peremptory strikes of African and Asian Americans during jury selection. It had also included calling to the witness stand American GIs who remembered hearing a female disc jockey broadcasting Japanese propaganda, even though these witnesses had trouble remembering key details—like the dates of broadcasts, times of day, and the sounds of the voices they heard—that would help distinguish Iva from other announcers.

Despite those weaknesses in his case, DeWolfe’s direct examination of two men from Radio Tokyo had gone exceedingly well. George Mitsushio, the American who’d renounced his citizenship, and his sidekick Kenkichi Oki had perjured themselves after being solicited by none other than Harry Brundidge, whom the Department of Justice had sent to Japan as an agent of the government to find and interview witnesses for the prosecution.

DeWolfe knew that, four years after Brundidge had first interviewed Iva, he was still more interested in making a name for himself than in finding the truth. The yellow-journalist-turned-government-investigator had threatened former American citizens like Mitsushio and Oki with treason charges if they didn’t testify against Iva.

As DeWolfe lay in bed, staring at the ceiling for the fifth straight hour, he tried to quell his uneasiness with the idea of putting witnesses on the stand who were very likely lying. Not your job, Thomas , he said to himself. These are the witnesses your bosses want you to call. It’s not your job to question their decisions.