Having Wonderful Time

Time turned backward for aging William Randolph Hearst. Once again, as in the days of his beloved Spanish-American War (when Hearst himself dramatically "invaded" Cuba from a chartered steamboat, captured 26 wet, befuddled Spanish sailors whose ship had been sunk in the Battle of Santiago), a Hearst reporter was dashing about, brushing the Army & Navy aside, taking strategically important objectives singlehanded, and revealing all. The reporter: bulky, handsome Clark ("Chang") Lee, 38. In six days, by his own word, Clark Lee had: P: Been the first to find "Tokyo Rose" (see RADIO).

P: Accepted the "surrender" of part of the Japanese fleet from his old Shanghai golfing partner, Rear Admiral Masao Kanazawa, who proposed that both sides should now have a drink together, as after a golf match.

P: Captured in Japan Gestapo Colonel Joseph Meisinger, whom Lee identified as the "Brutal Butcher of Warsaw." Colonel Meisinger obligingly signed: "I have surrendered today to Clark Lee, Bob Brumby of Mutual Broadcasting and John A. Bockhorst of News of the Day Newsreel."

This kind of Richard Harding Davis journalism had been going on ever since Clark Lee had the good fortune to be sitting in the A.P.'s Manila office on Dec. 7, 1941. His father was an early president of U.P., but Clark went to work for the A.P. instead, worked first in Latin America, then in the Far East (where he married a Hawaiian princess, Liliuokalani Kawananakoa). Friends in the Japanese Army tipped him off in November 1941 that it was time to get out of Shanghai.

Having gotten as far as Manila, Clark Lee spent days in Bataan's front lines, sent in some of the Pacific war's first eye-witnessers--and some of the first enthusiastic stories of MacArthur's military genius. He got out to Australia just before MacArthur, came home to write a bestseller, They Call It Pacific, urging more guns and men in the East. This suited Willie Hearst's line: he hired Lee away from A.P. at a fat raise, but then packed him off to Europe. In the ETO, Lee was a fish out of his Pacific waters. He never really paid off for Hearst until he went back to Bataan--and Tokyo.

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