Forty-six years ago today, President Gerald Ford reminded Americans that questioning the patriotism of others, even during wartime, is a perilous path. Although the U.S. is not currently at war, it often seems as though we are at war with ourselves. The angriest voices on cable news, the snarkiest tweeters, the most bombastic voices in Congress -- on the left and the right -- hog the national microphone. Today it's become de rigueur for conservatives to be called "fascists" or progressives to be labeled "communists." Hyper-partisans routinely accuse the other side's elected officials of being "traitors."
Such over-the-top rhetoric demeans America's history, a national story involving shared sacrifice while confronting actual communism on the Korean peninsula and the skies above Berlin -- and smashing actual fascism on battlefields from Okinawa to Normandy.
On this date in 1977 -- on his last full day in the White House -- a president who'd answered his country's call during World War II issued a presidential pardon to an American woman named Iva Toguri.
Known to American audiences in her day as "Tokyo Rose," Ms. Toguri was widely portrayed by the government and the U.S. media as one of the most nefarious traitors in World War II. The truth was very nearly opposite, and during the week when we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., Iva Toguri's ordeal is a fitting reminder that racism comes in many guises.
Iva Ikuko Toguri was born on July 4, 1916, in Los Angeles. Having a daughter who shared America's birthday thrilled her immigrant parents, who raised her in middle-class Southern California, with all the advantages it offered. Iva took tennis lessons, played swing music on the piano, and attended Methodist church services with her family. Her parents spoke English at home, so their daughter never learned Japanese.
Caring for her diabetic mother inspired Iva toward medicine. She majored in biology at UCLA, graduating in 1941. She planned to get a nursing certificate, but when an aunt in Japan became ill, Iva's parents believed it would be good experience for the young lady to care for her, so off she went. It was the beginning of an interminably long nightmare.
Iva had no passport, but the State Department issued an emergency travel certificate. This meant that when Japan attacked the U.S. in December of 1941, she found herself in a hostile foreign land, where she didn't speak the language and without papers that would facilitate her trip home. She didn't even like Japanese food.
Worse, when Iva expressed pro-U.S. sympathies in the war, her aunt and uncle kicked her out of the house. She was eventually pressed into service as a Japanese radio deejay broadcaster -- one of some dozen such female deejays soon to be nicknamed "Tokyo Rose" -- who played American music along with a steady supply of propaganda designed to sap the morale of U.S. servicemen.
It did no such thing, of course, and in Toguri's case particularly, her over-the-top commentary and tongue-in-cheek asides were meant as a signal to U.S. Navy sailors (men such as Lt. Gerald Ford, a USS Monterey antiaircraft battery officer), not to take the broadcasts too seriously. Toguri also smuggled food and clothes to fellow Western prisoners of war.
All of this was to no avail after Japan surrendered and the U.S. government decided to make an example of her. Toguri was brought to San Francisco and put on trial for treason. An all-white jury convicted her. A federal judge gave her 10 years in prison.
After serving her time, she was ordered deported to Japan, which had never been her home; along the way she lost a baby and her husband.
Eventually Toguri settled back in the United States, living anonymously in Chicago, working for her father until his death in the early 1970s. Grateful for her pardon by President Ford, Ms. Toguri expressed only one regret: that her dad had not lived long enough to see it happen.
When a sympathetic American reporter asked her about her ordeal, she cited her father's faith in her -- specifically, that she never gave up on her country.
"You were like a tiger," he told his daughter. "You never changed your stripes, you stayed American through and through."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
