Double-Edged Secretsi U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II
by Barbara Klaw
by W. J. Holmes Naval Institute Press 35 photographs and maps 231 pages, $11.95
The story of breaking the World War II Japanese code has been told before, but never from the inside. Holmes, a retired Navy captain, spent the war in the naval intelligence center—Fleet Radio Unit, Pacific or FRUPac—at Pearl Harbor, and he tells about the baffling task of that most unmilitary office as only a participant could.
Navy cryptanalysts, hidden away in a basement with their complex machines and masses of disparate data, sweated over their seemingly impenetrable puzzles or sometimes simply played hunches. Their sources included weather reports, documents salvaged from a sunken enemy submarine, even a count of privies on an enemy-held island. Again and again, when they had succeeded in breaking part of a code, it would suddenly be changed, “like blowing out a candle,” Holmes says, leaving FRUPac to start all over again.
Although proud of FRUPac’s contribution, the author feels that we paid a high price to keep the Japanese from learning that we had penetrated their communications. Often we deliberately failed to act on what we knew. Holmes still grieves that hundreds of American lives were lost by this policy. “Secrecy is a double-edged weapon,” he concludes, “and it sometimes inflicts deeper wounds on its wielder than upon his opponents.”
The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition
by Barbara Klaw
by W. J. Rorabaugh Oxford University Press 30 line cuts 224 pages, $13.95
Until 1830, Americans seem to have spent their days in an alcoholic haze. Practically everyone drank spirits regularly at home, starting at breakfast, and consumed startling amounts on every public occasion, including trials and quilting bees. In this well-documented book, Rorabaugh tells what our ancestors chose to drink and why they drank so much of it. He also traces the rise of the temperance movement, which, by the end of the 1830’s, had turned our sodden citizens into “the world’s most zealous abstainers.” A lively, surprising book.
Clover
by Barbara Klaw
by Otto Friedrich Simon and Schuster Photographic section 416 pages, $12.95
Historians generally have assumed that Clover Hooper Adams, Henry Adams’ wife for thirteen apparently idyllic years, killed herself out of grief over her father’s death. But the puzzling fact that her husband never mentions her name in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, published years later, led Otto Friedrich to suspect that the reason for Clover’s suicide could not be that simple.
His sensitive, urbane biography is convincing. On that bleak day in 1885 when Clover went up to her room and drank potassium cyanide, she left no note of explanation, but the author has carefully drawn together enough revealing threads of Hooper and Adams’ backgrounds, tastes, and reticences to suggest half a dozen reasons for Clover’s lethal depression.
Clover and Henry seemed designed for each other. As he once wrote her, “How did I ever manage to hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere?” One was as acerbic and clever as the other; both were equally snobbish about the Gilded Age society they ridiculed and adorned. But there were strains that threatened Clover’s rarified world: the Adamses were childless; Henry wrote a cruel pseudonymous novel about a character suspiciously like his wife; and late in their marriage, he fell in love with a younger woman. Written with delicacy and wit, this is wonderful reading.
