Ours is a society that is driven by the almighty dollar and the media! Yes, the media, the newspapers, radio, and especially television. The media has so much power that it can transform a mediocre first term Senator from the Midwest into a successful presidential candidate! It can make heroes out of villains and villains out of innocent people!
Those of us who are of Vietnam generation well remember the antics of Jane Fonda. Hanoi Jane would have been imprisoned, at the very least censured by Hollywood and would have never made another movie after her anti-American (not anti-war!) activities! Any other person, with less fame and media connections would have been literally crucified for her activities! The worst was the posing for a photo wearing North Vietnamese helmet and manning an anti-aircraft gun during her visit to Hanoi, while U.S. POWs were suffering in "Hanoi Hilton" and other POW camps near by! Yet, the press made her out to be some sort of a anti-war folk hero! Granted, there were those in the media who were appalled by her antics and behavior, but they were silenced by the more powerful, the majority of our liberal press! Small wonder Obama thought of presenting Jane with a Medal of Freedom not too long ago! Fortunately, there must have been at least one person in Obama's advisory group who remembered Hanoi Jane, someone who had a sense of history that went beyond anything prior to Y2K! Somehow the whole plan to award her with a Medal of Freedom sort of fizzled. Nevertheless, Jane never had to pay for her bad behavior, in fact, she has prospered since! I wish I could collect a fraction of royalties that she made on her exercise video! Contrast that with what happened to another woman, one not so lucky to have strong connections with the media!
Iva Toguri was a typical California girl, a Japanese-American. She had graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Science degree and was planning to attend medical school to become a doctor. Her mother was in poor health, so when her sister who was in Japan died, Iva was sent to Japan to represent the American side of the family. At the time, Iva could only speak halting Japanese, she could not read or write in Japanese!
When she applied for a passport, she was told that it would take at least a month, and she needed to travel soon, so she opted to travel with a Letter of Identity issued by the State Department. She was told that she would have no problem using that letter to travel to and from Japan. This was just before things went sour and the war broke out.
Iva traveled to Japan, attended her aunt's funeral, but when she tried to board the ship going back home, she was told that the Letter of Identity was no good and she had to get a passport. So she went to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and applied for a passport. She was told it would take at least a month, perhaps longer. While she waited, the war broke out, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese government automatically conferred Japanese citizenship on all Japanese-Americans. The Kempeitai (secret police) told her that she was to renounce her U.S. citizenship and accept her Japanese nationality. She refused! She was harassed and even jailed briefly, but she still refused to give up her U.S. citizenship. The U.S. Embassy closed, and there was no way for her to get a passport. She had to survive, so she looked for a job through English language paper. She finally located a job opening at a radio station and went for an interview. There she was interviewed by an Australian Army Major Charles Hughes Cousens and a U.S. Army Captain Wallace Ivce. The two were early POWs captured and then turned into radio broadcasters in Tokyo. They hired Iva and assured her that she would not be doing anything against her country. They wrote the scripts that she was to read over radio broadcasts. So Iva took the job that she desperately needed to survive.
There were several English speaking girls that worked with Iva. Some were Japanese as well as other nationalities. In all, there were at least a dozen young women who worked at the station and read the broadcasts that were written by Cousens and or Ivce. The G.I.s who heard these broadcasts simply nick-named the women "Tokyo Rose." They had no idea whether it was one woman or several that did the broadcasts.
When the war ended the U.S. forces rounded up everyone and interrogated them. Everyone was declared innocent of wrong doing. Cousens went back to Australia and became a successful TV announcer. Wallace Ivce was promoted to Major and sent back to the states. All the girls were turned loose, Iva included. There was no U.S. Embassy yet, so she could not get a passport. When the embassy finally opened and she went to apply for a passport, some reporter got wind of it and word reached Walter Winchell, that paragon of virtue and righteousness, who decided to use this as a stepping stone to further increase his fame. Winchell, who was a good friend of J. Edgar Hoover, informed his FBI friend and at the same time started broadcasting how a traitor, a former "Tokyo Rose" was trying to get back to America! Naturally, with that kind of news coverage, and with FBI hot to pursue "war criminals," Iva did not stand a chance. She was brought back to the states, tried in essentially a kangaroo court, and convicted of traitorous acts and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The key witness to this sham trial was bribed by Winchell! On July 20, 2009, the PBS broadcast the show "History Detectives" in which the show revealed that the key witness had lied, bribed by Winchell, and other witnesses were intimidated by FBI to give "favorable" testimony for prosecution!
Because Iva Toguri was a nobody, just a young girl from California who was of Japanese descent, a very unpopular ethnicity at the time, she didn't stand a chance. Not against the likes of Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover, both psychotic personalities when it came to their ambitions.
Iva served 5 years of her 10 year sentence and was released. She lived quietly, running a flower shop, married to her Filipino husband D'Aquino. They had met in Tokyo during the war when both were stuck there. There were many who thought that a great injustice had been done and had constantly lobbied to try to correct history, to correct the wrong. In 1975 President Gerald Ford gave a full pardon to Iva Toguri D'Aquino. So at least, Iva could go to her death knowing that she was pardoned, that she was a loyal U.S. citizen that she said she was. The pardon was long time coming, but at least Ford (who was accused of incompetence and many other things by the media!) did the right thing by Iva, and by history. Ford did not attempt to give the Medal of Freedom to Hanoi Jane!
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