June 23, 2006
Mr. Sulzberger, Meet Colonel McCormick Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:45 PM EST The New York Times has done it again, leading this morning’s edition with the revelation of a highly classified government program, this one involving banking records, despite a request from the Bush Administration that, for national security reasons, it not do so. The program has already led to the capture of several high-level Al Qaeda operatives. Its future effectiveness is now in doubt.
The Times’s own story reports that the program is perfectly legal and that the appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on it. So why did the Times endanger the national security of the United States and injure the war effort? Simple: It had newspapers to sell and the country be damned.
The executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller, explained, “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”
Is “public interest” the only thing to consider? No doubt the public would have been most interested in the spring of 1944 to learn that Operation Overlord was intending to land in Normandy, not the Pas de Calais. The OSS was going to a great deal of trouble—even to the point of building a dummy army and feeding the Nazis information about it through turned German spies—to deceive Hitler into believing that that was where the landings were going to be. There is no doubt that their success in this deception was a vital element in the success of the D-Day landings.
Mr. Keller’s statement contains not one word about the possible adverse effect of the Times’s story on the War on Terror. It is hard to escape the idea that the Times just doesn’t care if it can sell some papers. If it can do the Bush administration an injury in the process, well, so much the better.
All this is very reminiscent of the Chicago Tribune when it was run by Colonel Robert R. McCormick. McCormick was a great, barrel-chested bully of a man who stood well over six feet tall. Born to great wealth (his great-uncle Cyrus McCormick had invented the reaper that revolutionized American agriculture, his mother’s family owned the Chicago Tribune), McCormick hated Franklin Roosevelt and all he stood for. His animus to FDR and the New Deal permeated his newspaper, both news columns and editorials, as much as eggs permeate a cake. Or animus to George Bush permeates the New York Times.
There were numerous breaches of national secrets in the Tribune, thanks to McCormick’s get-Roosevelt-at-any-cost attitude, but the most spectacular and potentially by far the most damaging occurred on June 7th, 1942, shortly after the Battle of Midway had transformed the strategic situation in the Pacific but before the extent of the American victory was fully known. That morning’s front page carried the headline NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLANS TO STRIKE AT SEA. The Tribune attributed the information it published to “reliable sources in the naval intelligence.”
The inescapable conclusion any knowledgeable person reading the story would have made was that naval intelligence had broken the Japanese naval code (JN-25). This, of course, is exactly what it had done, one of the most valuable and closely guarded secrets of the entire war. The Navy, apoplectic, and assuming that the damage had already been done, wanted to bring McCormick up on charges under the Espionage Act to make an example of him. This just kept the story going in the papers, and the Navy was finally persuaded that the legal necessity of revealing much intelligence in open court made it impossible to pursue it and dropped the case.
The damage might have been catastrophic. Our ability to read the code was an enormous tactical advantage and had the Japanese changed their codes, there would in all probability have been tens of thousands more dead American sailors and marines before the war was over or we were able to crack the new code. By the mercy of providence, the Japanese inexplicably failed to note the story in the American media and did not change their codes.
Robert McCormick, as morally obtuse as he was politically self-indulgent, was a far-right Roosevelt hater who indulged his hate at the expense of his country. The publisher of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., seems no different, except for his place on the political spectrum.
What was once the greatest newspaper the world has ever known is much diminished.
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