After plowing through the page one story in the Times about how the Obama administration — egged on by some members of the Republican leadership — has been mounting a hunt for leakers of national security information, we finally threw down the paper and went to the bookshelf to fetch a copy of Lloyd Wendt’s history of the Chicago Tribune. We opened it to page 630 to savor the image of the front page of June 7, 1942.

JAP FLEET SMASHED BY U.S.

TWO CARRIERS SUNK AT MIDWAY

13 TO 15 NIPPON SHIPS HIT

PACIFIC BATTLE RAGES ON

YANK FLYERS EXACT HEAVY TOLL;

ENEMY LOSES MANY PLANES

The paper’s managing editor, J. Loy Maloney, would call it the “best front page ever published by the Tribune.” Tucked under the main headline was another story that was so hot that when its reporter, Stanley Johnston, called the Tribune from San Francisco to say he had a “great story” and was told to “send it in,” as Wendt tells the tale, Johnston refused to talk about it. He insisted he had to go through Navy censorship. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been, nor what ship, nor how I got back.”

His editor deduced immediately that he’d come from the Coral Sea. News of a big sea battle there had been coming in for weeks. Fearing that Johnston would stop off to see his wife at San Francisco, Maloney raced a writer to intercept him on the coast and told him to wire a copy of the story to Washington in line with the protocol for civilian censorship. Johnston wouldn’t do it. “This is Navy censorship,” Wendt quotes him as saying. “I can’t put it on an open wire.”

The editor promptly ordered Johnston, wife or no wife, to present himself in the Tribune newsroom so that the paper could learn what in blazes the story was about. Meantime a communique came out of naval headquarters at Honolulu of another big naval battle. It led the edition of June 6 under the headline: “JAPS REPULSED AT MIDWAY.” At this point, Wendt writes, Maloney was “frantic” for, as Wendt put it, “[t]he public would be convinced only if there were details.”

When Johnston reached Chicago, he was installed in a glass-front cubicle off the newsroom. Editors raced in and out, fetching Johnston’s copy, a first person account of the Battle of the Coral Sea, including the sinking of a carrier, United States Ship Lexington. Maloney told the Tribune’s proprietor, Colonel McCormick, it was the best story of the war. Yet they had to stand by for it to pass censorship. McCormick turned around and astounded his editors by ordering that once the story was cleared by the censors they should give it to all the other papers. “It will be good for the people’s morale,” McCormick declared.

At some point in the frenzy, the writer who’d been assigned to work with Johnston, Wayne Thomis, went to see Maloney. “Stan Johnston tells me he can give you a good idea of the Jap task force that is being defeated at Midway,” Wendt quotes Thomis as saying. “You write it,” Maloney commanded. That is how the storied front page, fronting the epic of the battle that turned the tide in the Pacific, came to include a side dispatch that would emerge at the center of one of the bitterest disputes over national security in the history of moveable type.

The story ran under a one-column headline and carried no byline. It was datelined Washington and had been cleared by civilian censorship and attributed to naval intelligence officers. “NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA. Knew Dutch Harbor* Was a Feint.” The story ran not only in the Tribune but in the Times-Herald at Washington, where it was read by the commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet, Admiral King, who, Wendt relates, was aware that Admiral Nimitz’s knowledge of the planned strike against Midway was “derived from one of the most sensitive secrets of U.S. military intelligence” — that America had broken Japanese “machine-enciphered code.”

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There’s not a newspaper editor in America who doesn’t know this story, but the feature of it that has always struck us is the sheer newspapermanliness of McCormick and his editors. Maloney immediately suspected the Navy secretary, Frank Knox, erstwhile publisher of the Chicago Daily News, was up to no good. Wendt reports that the Tribune’s managing editor “guessed that Knox was incensed at the Tribune’s exclusive.” Maloney wasn’t worried about the secret code. He “felt instantly,” though, that the Roosevelt administration “would exploit this incident to do all it could to injure the Tribune, and especially Colonel McCormick.”

McCormick, after all, had been a long-time foe of FDR. The paper’s celebrated lawyers, Weymouth Kirkland and Howard Ellis, immediately recognized what Wendt calls “the potential gravity of the situation.” When Maloney and Johnston were summoned to Washington, they met with a hostile board headed by Admiral King’s chief of staff and including a special assistant to Attorney General Biddle, one of the most notorious enemies of the Tribune. Yet when the editor and reporter went through how the information was gathered and the effort to keep it secret until censorship was passed, the explanation was accepted even by the assistant attorney general. Writes Wendt: “The incident seemed to be over.”

It was the political level that insisted it go to trial. The pending indictment was leaked to a New York tabloid, PM, financed by McCormick’s archenemy, Marshall Field. PM conjectured that, as Wendt put it, “the Navy has persuaded Biddle to proceed in the hope of discouraging any further such flagrant violations of the censorship regulation.” Friends of the Tribune in Congress, Wendt recounts, “asserted that the government was going to extreme lengths to smear the paper by announcing its indictment intentions.” In the Senate, Robert Taft and Joel “Champ” Clark declared for a free press.

In the House, Wendt writes, Congressman Elmer Holland boomed that the Tribune and its newspaper allies “consciously or unconsciously under Hitler’s orders or their own steam are working to defeat the United States and the enslavement of the country.” Feature the telegram that Colonel McCormick sent his Washington bureau man, Arthur Sears Henning: “Let the smear of the Tribune news develop itself. Do not seek any interviews but for my own information I wish you would tell me all you know about it and especially if the naval officers were square or crooked.”

The answer came from another Tribune bureau man, Walter Trohan. The Navy “had acted when it felt its security had been compromised,” Wendt summarizes the message as saying. “When it the learned the facts, it dropped the charges.” Maloney, Wendt writes, was “proud of his own war record” and “intensely patriotic” and shaken by the showdown. He still faced prosecution. So he dug down deep and did one of those things newspapermen will talk about until the last bar closes.

He spurned the advice of the lawyers, and with Johnston in tow, walked into the office of what Wendt calls a “surprised” Assistant Attorney General Mitchell, who was in Chicago, and “demanded to be heard by the grand jury.” It was an astounding request. Mitchell wouldn’t accede — until he telephoned Washington. The grand jury heard the newspapermen in secret on August 19, and the following day the grand jury refused to hand up a true bill.

“U.S. JURY CLEARS TRIBUNE,” was the headline the next day. The Tribune ran out McCormick’s famous statement. “I never had the slightest fear of an indictment. I have known Mahoney for 25 years, and when I confided the Tribune’s honor to him it was with thorough knowledge of his character.” Of Johnson he said: “[t]he impression he made upon all who came in contact with him furnished a complete guarantee of his integrity.” Of the Tribune he said, “our whole effort is to win the war and we will not indulge in any factionalism excepting insofar as we are persecuted and have to defend ourselves.”

* * *

The moral of this tale for both President Obama and his detractors is that they’re playing a loser’s game trying to run around with lawyers plugging the leaks in his administration. The Sun doesn’t know where the leaks are coming from, and we’re not losing a lot of sleep over it. Our concern is with the president. There is a sense in this country and in our officer corps that, while the president has had his moments, his heart has never been in this war. He campaigned for the presidency against it. He is always asking for patience. He is cutting back our military while we’re still in the fight. No wonder there are so many leaks.

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* Site of an American naval base in the Aleutians; one short account of this was published by the U.S. Naval Institute. It says, among other things, that the way Walter Winchell handled the details in his attack on the Tribune was “far more worrisome to the code breakers.”