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Reporter with zest for stories turns author
By Terry Plumb - Special to The Heraldhttp://www.heraldonline.com/opinions/plumbline/story/1392524.html
As a reporter, James Scott had a zest for stories requiring lots of digging. He was only a couple of years out of Wofford College, working as city government reporter for The Herald, when he and veteran photographer Jim Stratakos produced an award-winning series on squalid conditions in the Blackmon Road community.
The series inspired individuals, churches and various agencies to tackle the area once known as “Trash Pile Road.” Many good things that subsequently happened down there, including A Place for Hope and extension of sewer and water lines, can be traced to those articles.
Scott, a native of Charlotte, later joined The Charleston Post & Courier, where he won several awards for investigative reporting, before landing a Nieman fellowship at Harvard. It was during that year-long residency that he began researching in earnest a story that he had long interested him: The 1967 attack by Israeli air and naval units on a U.S. spy ship, which resulted in the deaths of 34 Americans and wounding of 171 others.
The fruits of Scott's research have been realized with the release of “Attack on the Liberty,” published by Simon & Schuster. Long since forgotten by most Americans, the episode had special significance for the author. His dad was a young ensign aboard the Liberty.
“Attack on the Liberty” actually is two stories, told exceedingly well.
The first is about how the officers and crew courageously responded to an unprovoked attack, in broad daylight, in international waters off Egypt, during the Six Day War.
The Liberty repeatedly was raked by fire from Israeli jets, then attacked by three torpedo boats, which launched a total five torpedoes, one of which ripped a gigantic hole at the ship's water line. The latter blast nearly sank the Liberty and accounted for most of the fatalities, including several men whose bodies were never recovered.
Scott writes that no U.S. ship had been torpedoed since World War II, so it would be understandable if the crew had been ill-prepared. Fortunately, the skipper was a relentless taskmaster who drilled his men for any eventuality. Had they not been so well-trained, the casualties would have been much worse.
Capt. William McGonagle himself would receive the Medal of Honor for remaining on the bridge while severely wounded. Several others, including John Scott, the author's dad, would receive the Silver Star.
Scott's graphic descriptions of the damage inflicted on man and machine rival some of the best combat reporting, but the larger story is whether the attack was a case of mistaken identity – as Israel claimed – and whether top-ranking U.S. military and civilian authorities, under pressure from President Johnson, cravenly accepted that explanation.
Skepticism was rampant at the time about some Israeli claims: That they thought they were attacking an Egyptian cargo ship, that the Liberty failed to identify herself or that the U.S. flag was hard to see. Scott explains how each of those excuses was refuted at the time.
Nor is he the first to speculate that Lyndon Johnson wanted to sweep the incident under the carpet to avoid further alienating the Jewish vote, already stridently opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Thanks in part to recently declassified documents, however, as well as hundreds of interviews with participants, Scott presents a damning case against the aggressors. He was able to obtain a translation of a radio transmission in which a high-ranking Israeli officer, upon hearing a pilot thought the ship might be American, said to attack anyway.
The cover up on both sides was blatant. “The American government never forced Israel to product its pilots, torpedo boat skippers or commanders to testify,” Scott writes. “Likewise, the government never demanded that Israel submit its ship logs, flight books or recordings of its pilot communications, all reasonable requests between allied nations.”
Although the attack on the Liberty and the public reaction was a major news story for a time, it soon fell off the front page. As the author says, it's hard to keep the nation's attention on the deaths of 34 American military when more bodies than that were being shipped back from Vietnam every day.
Scott deserves credit for reminding countrymen of the Liberty but most of all for telling us about the courageous acts of those who served her.