That wasn’t exactly true. It was an inference: If this fellow wasn’t doing a hell of a good job, Charley Ansley would have canned him long ago.
“That’s very kind of Mr. Ansley, sir,” the station chief— whose name had never come up—replied, almost blushing with pleasure.
Pickering got into the backseat of the limousine. The station chief waited at the curb until the limousine was out of sight.
This is not the first time I’ve been driven from an airfield into Tokyo in a limousine. The circumstances were different the last time. The last time, Japanese soldiers and police and ordinary civilians lined the streets, bowing their heads toward the cars of their American conquerors.
I was involved in that goddamn war, literally from the first shots until the last act.
But that was a long time ago, General, and incidentally, General, you’re not a general anymore.
On December 7, 1941, wakened by the sound of low-flying aircraft, Fleming Pickering had gotten out of his bed in the penthouse suite of the Foster Waikiki Beach Hotel in Honolulu and watched the Japanese attack on the Navy base at Pearl Harbor.
He had been enraged, not only at the Japanese sneak attack, but also at what he perceived to be the nearly criminal incompetence of the senior military—especially the senior Naval—officers in Hawaii, who he felt had been derelict in allowing such an attack to happen.
He had sailed that night to Seattle, Washington, aboard the Pacific Princess, the flagship of the Pacific & Far East fleet, which had been commandeered by the U.S. Navy and was to be converted to a troop transport. Its speed, it was theorized—and later proven—would make it immune to Japanese submarine attack.
Once in the United States, Pickering had immediately gone to Washington to volunteer for service as a Marine again. Brigadier General D. G. McInerney, USMC, with whom he had served—both of them sergeants—at Belleau Wood in France in the First World War, more or less gently told him there was no place in the Marine Corps for him, and that he could make a greater contribution to the war effort by running Pacific & Far East.
It was the second time he had been, so to speak, rejected for government service.
Before the war had involved the United States—but when he had known that war was inevitable—he had been offered “a suitable position” in the “Office of the Coordinator of Information,” later renamed the Office of Strategic Services. Swallowing his intense dislike of the Coordinator of Information himself, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, he had gone to Washington for an interview and found that what Donovan had in mind was a bureaucratic post under a man for whom Pickering had a profound disgust.
Forced to admit that Mac McInerney was right—he was not qualified to be a Marine captain, much less a Marine colonel, which is what he had more than a little egotistically had in mind—Pickering had gone from McInerney’s Eighth and “I” Streets office to the Foster Lafayette Hotel, across from the White House, where he was staying in the apartment of his close friend, Senator Richardson K. Fowler (R., Cal.). Once there, nursing his rejection, he had promptly crawled most of the way into a quart bottle of the senator’s Famous Grouse.
When Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had appeared unannounced in the apartment to see Senator Fowler, Pickering had lost little time in sharing with the Secretary his opinion that “the Pearl Harbor admirals” should be court-martialed and that Knox himself should resign. Almost as an afterthought, he told Knox that he would fight the Navy’s intention of commandeering the entire Pacific & Far East fleet—they could have the Pacific Princess and the other passenger ships, but that’s all—all the way to the Supreme Court.
The next day, nursing a monumental hangover as he flew back to San Francisco, he was convinced that his drunken attack on Knox—for that’s unquestionably what it had been—had ended once and for all any chance of his ever again serving in uniform.
He was wrong. A few days later, Helen Florian, his secretary, had put her head in his office and announced that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was in her office and wanted to see him.
Pickering was convinced that it was payback time for their encounter in Senator Fowler’s apartment. Knox was almost certainly going to tell him, with justified relish, that the U.S. Navy was commandeering every vessel in the P&FE fleet and the P&FE building, “for