Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [140]
Baldwin’s October reporting got him invited to a November meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Strategic Survey Committee, a “solemn conclave” held in the U.S. Public Health Service Building, across from the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue. Baldwin was asked to take a seat at a long table with twenty-five or thirty officers of all services in dress uniforms and testify secretly to what he had seen on Guadalcanal. The hitch was that he could not tell his bosses at the Times about it. He agreed and entered the large meeting room as a witness to events at the front.
“I spoke more frankly, of course, than I was able to do in the pieces I’d written,” Baldwin said. He described how the North Carolina had been torpedoed and how, with but one battleship and one carrier in the theater at the time, “we were just hanging on by our teeth. When I said this about the ship damage and about the cruisers that had been lost at Savo, and I gave them the names of the cruisers in this secret meeting. A Navy captain stood up, violently angry, and said, ‘I object to that, I object to that. This is top-secret information! Admiral King has given the strictest orders that no one is to know about this!’
“Well, of course,” Baldwin told his antagonist, “I understand it’s top-secret information. I haven’t published the names of these ships or the exact losses or details and I don’t expect to. I was asked to come down here in top secrecy and not even tell my paper about it, and I’ve done so.” As the captain kept pressing his case, Baldwin gathered the impression that many of the officers who were there that day, sitting on a committee charged with advising the president on military matters, had no idea what had actually happened in the waters off Guadalcanal back in August. “That,” Baldwin would say, “is a hell of a way to run a war.”
Change was already in the air. When Admiral Spruance first laid eyes on a copy of the Boise’s after-action report from the Battle of Cape Esperance, air-couriered to Pearl Harbor from Nouméa, he gave it to Nimitz, who gave it to King, and all understood what a publicity bonanza it was. So began the process of legend building that would make some ships famous for things they never did, and leave others unknown despite their great deeds. A statement in the report that “the Boise fired on six targets” was conflated in the press to the Boise sinking six ships. A Navy publicist referred to the Boise as a “one-ship task force.” As a result of this hype, few would ever hear of Captain Hoover and the Helena, whose barrels flaked as much paint as the Boise’s had that night off Guadalcanal. When the Boise reached the Philadelphia Navy Yard for repairs in late November, the public saw a living, breathing man-of-war baring her scars—and the accuracy of history was quickly a casualty.
News of the Boise’s performance at Cape Esperance was released simultaneously with, and perhaps as an antidote to, the darker tale of the Battle of Savo Island. As reporters began to challenge the Navy Department’s manipulations, King, in spite of himself, took a page from Nimitz’s book. He began hosting meetings with newsmen at the Virginia home of his attorney and friend, Cornelius Bull. At the first such gathering, on November 6, King circulated among eight reporters, addressing rumors that operations at Guadalcanal were foundering and rebutting the accusation that the Navy was stonewalling press inquiries. He defended his silence during the early phase of the operation on grounds of operational security. “There was every reason to believe that the Japanese did not know the extent of their success,” he said. Breaking a personal oath, he drank alcohol