Luis Cruz: Welcome to “San Diego News Fix: The Backstory,” where we tackle important questions about journalism ethics and give you an inside look into our newsroom.
Today we’re going to be looking back at an incident that rocked the Navy a little more than 50 years ago. It was a race riot aboard the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. ing us to talk about the incident are Union-Tribune feature writer John Wilkens, enterprise editor Kristina Davis, managing editor Lora Cicalo, and we begin with publisher and editor Jeff Light.
Jeff Light: John, thank you for coming on and sharing this story with us. It’s interesting to me, not so much as a question of media ethics or decision making, which is often our topic here, but your story is about a participant in a moment of history, who – 50 years later – is coming forward and telling a story in a different way than has generally been accepted across the decades around this pretty important moment in the Navy’s history and in San Diego’s history. Why don’t you just rough out the background, and then I think both Lora and Kristina also have some questions that maybe you can get at.
John Wilkens: In October of 1972, the Kitty Hawk was over in waters off Vietnam as part of the Vietnam War and they had been at sea for quite a while. There’s racial tension on board the ship, and it boiled over overnight, in about a six-hour period where tensions ran high and there were some groups of Black sailors going around the ship beating on White sailors and vice versa. Afterward, many of the defendants were sent to San Diego, where the Kitty Hawk was homeported, and were put on trial. They were court-martialed on rioting and assault charges. One of the defense lawyers in the Navy was a guy named Marv Truhe, who represented six of the defendants. He kept all of his records from those trials, and 50 years later he decided it was finally time to write a book and tell what he describes as the full story.
Jeff Light: So this lawyer – Marv – was 27 years old at the time, and now he’s carried with him his records from this case through the rest of his life, right? You were describing to me how he’d moved around the country. He’s carried this record with him, and now, finally, 50 years later, he has sat down to write. Tell me a little bit about what motivated him and the story that he tells, as opposed to the story that was generally known.
John Wilkens: This story has come down through the ages mostly as a story of Black sailors running amok on the Kitty Hawk, and there’s been discussion about why they might have done that – the injustices they experienced on board the ship. But the story he tells is a little bit more complicated than that.
He was bothered at the time that the trials were going on about the way that the stories had unfolded. He was bothered by some of the unfairness that he said he saw within the judicial system as he tried to defend these sailors, and so that always kind of bothered him. It raised questions in his mind about the Navy – an institution that he respected then and still respects. It raised questions about fairness in the legal system, which he made his life’s work. And it raised questions to him about things like honesty and integrity. He’s a farm boy from South Dakota, raised by a dad who had pointed out prejudice that existed against Native Americans in his hometown. So, this thing just never quite sat right with him over these years, and he felt that he needed to sort of tell a fuller story about it.
Jeff Light: You were briefing me a little bit on some of those points of unfairness that seemed particularly glaring. For instance, six Black sailors were arrested and charged, and one White sailor.
John Wilkens: Twenty-five Black sailors. That was the original group that was accused a couple of weeks after the incident unfolded. Two of them agreed to be tried right there on the ship, so they were punished on board and they were hoping to stay in the Navy. The others asked for outside counsel and the courts-martial were moved to San Diego. So, eventually 23 sailors were subject to courts-martial in San Diego and only one of them was White. He was charged three months after the original incident, by the time everybody was back in San Diego.
Jeff Light: And the prosecutor on the case against the White sailor?
John Wilkens: He was a newcomer; he was brand new and had almost no experience. As Marv Truhe explains in the book, he didn’t really have much of an idea what he was doing and was very nervous because these cases had attracted some national attention. He put on his case, and it took the jury about eight minutes to acquit.
Jeff Light: So, you get the flavor that perhaps this was a token prosecution against the one White sailor.
John Wilkens: Yes, and the Black sailors, I think almost all of them were kept in the brig at 32nd Street Naval Station in pretrial confinement, which was unusual, for more than three months. Marv Truhe found the Navy hiding evidence from him and the other defense lawyers as this went on. And there were some pretty wild things that went on. At one point, after one of his clients was convicted, they hired a private detective to befriend the main witness in that case to try to catch the witness itting that he was racist and that he’d lied during the trial. That’s the kind of thing you might read in a crime novel. They did that and it worked, and those tapes began to undercut the story that the Navy had been telling all along about the incident.
Jeff Light: Lora, I think you had a question for John about the racial justice components of this story.
Lora Cicalo: Yes. I was struck in a sneak peek at your story that the author that you’re profiling seems to raise this question – maybe even to himself – of what we have learned, collectively, since this incident. It seemed as though – in the wake of the George Floyd murder – he began to look at this through a different lens than he had previously.
John Wilkens: Yes, I think maybe he has been more reflective on that. He started trying to write this book shortly after all this happened and then he put it aside because, you know, life gets in the way. He left the Navy after four years, he worked for the attorney general in South Dakota and then went into private practice. He always saw this book as mainly a snapshot in time, but then I think as he was writing it, he began to reflect on what larger messages this might have for the rest of the world – in particular, the questions it may raise about how much progress we’ve made in America toward racial equality.
Jeff Light: Yes, the criminal justice system – both on the military side and certainly in civil society – is a great place to look for signs of inequitable treatment, and people are very uncomfortable with those questions, I think.
Kristina, you had a question about the Navy itself and the idea of ability.
Kristina Davis: Yes, kind of going off what Lora was saying, is he’s had to sit down 50 years later and kind of revisit all of this and try to make sense of it. He says something near the end of the story about how he doesn’t really blame the institution of the Navy for this and he doesn’t say the Navy is a racist institution or anything like that; he says it was really a few senior officers. So, I was curious about who these senior officers were and what were his theories behind that, and was there ever ability at the higher ranks?
John Wilkens: The author, Marv Truhe, was very, very careful, both in the book and in my interview with him, to not broad brush the entire Navy. He still has enormous respect for the institution. He has enormous respect for people who put on the uniform. He thinks it was some senior officers who lost their way. The captain of the ship, Marland Townsend, had ed the Kitty Hawk just four months before this happened. He was still kind of trying to find his way and his footing with the crew, and as Truhe shows us in the book, he made some missteps early in of his disciplinary proceedings against the crew .
It’s pretty clear that he punished the Black sailors more severely than the White sailors for similar infractions. That kind of thing just fed into what was already a boiling pot on a lot of this kind of stuff. Captain Townsend, I think it’s clear from the book, had his career short-circuited a little bit and he didn’t move on to positions you might have expected him to move on to if this had not happened. But none of the senior officers faced any kind of immediate disciplinary proceedings because of this case.
Jeff Light: Whenever I read this kind of from insiders years later, it’s so troubling to me. You feel like, as a journalist, boy, we don’t have access to the real story. I think he even said the reporters at the time did the best they could, or something like that. In a way, he was charitable, but he had a sort of low expectation of what journalists would be able to get at.
John Wilkens: Yes, I think that’s true. The military is always a hard nut to crack, as many of us know from working in journalism over the years, and in this case, for example, the defendants were under a gag order not to talk. The lawyers, as lawyers often do, don’t want to talk about the case while it’s going on. They don’t want to say something that’s going to upset the judge or anything like that. So everybody’s closed-mouth. There’s no way to get access to the documents the way you might in a public court system. But he thought the journalists tried to do the best they could. They quoted defense attorneys who would say things in sort of circumspect ways that would raise questions about some of the things that were going on. Truhe, himself, was, on a number of occasions, an anonymous source to The New York Times and other publications, pointing them in certain directions about the wider topics about what might be going on in the Navy.
But I think you’re right. It’s very hard for any of us to ever get the full story, especially in the immediate force of time. Sometimes you have to let a little time go by for perspective to happen. And I think that’s what happened in this case with this author. Time has gone by; he’s had some life experience; he’s seen some things go on. Although, he said when he returned to these five banker’s boxes of documents and went through them, it reminded him of how angry he was in 1972 when this was happening, and it made him angry all over again.
Jeff Light: It’s a fascinating story. I’m really looking forward to spending more time on this topic.
Luis Cruz: Thank you very much, Jeff, Lora, Kristina and John. You can read more of John Wilkens’ story on our website. Thank you very much for ing us and for ing local journalism.
