Asia Ernie

By Patrick J. Killen

Pat Killen's collection of stories and memories of the exhilarating life of Earnest Hoberecht (pronounced Ho-bright), good old boy and war correspondent for United Press, stationed in Asia 1945-1988, is part modern history, part fascination, part legend. He reveals some secrets about Ernie's confidant, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and tells of Ernie's four wives, one a part-Asian beauty, and his efforts to keep afloat a major international news service.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664195592

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Copyright © 2021 by Patrick J. Killen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/11/2022

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Pat Killen’s collection of stories and memories of the exhilarating life of Earnest Hoberecht, good old boy from Oklahoma and war correspondent for United Press, stationed in Asia 1945-1966. He reveals some secrets about Ernie’s confidant, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and tells of Ernie’s four wives, one a part-Asian beauty, and his efforts to keep afloat a major news organization. Pat’s book is part modern history, part fascination and part legend.

Memories of Earnest Hoberecht’s 15 minutes

of fame and of his fellow UPI foreign

correspondents in Asia after World War II.

by Patrick J. Killen

After God created the world, He created man

and woman. And then to keep the whole thing

from collapsing, He created humor.

— Ernie Hoberecht

Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.

— Wilson Mizner

Dedication:

To my two lovely ladies, Miyoko, aka

Midaeja, and Kimberly, aka Kimbo.

They made my life sing.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1     The end of the year festival

Chapter 2     Better than Hemingway

Chapter 3     Ernie and The Kiss

Chapter 4     The Early Years

Chapter 5     Newsmen can do anything

Chapter 6     First in Japan

Chapter 7     The mysterious East — Ernie’s two weird stories

Chapter 8     How Ernie helped saved Taiwan for the Nationalist Chinese

Chapter 9     Walter Cronkite — the way it is

Chapter 10   The raincoat scoop … and the pigeons

Chapter 11   Ernie and MacArthur go to war

Chapter 12   Ernie says MacArthur was misled by his aides

Chapter 13   Ernie’s greatest stories

Chapter 14   The human-headed spider

Chapter 15   Working for Ernie

Chapter 16   Doing business in Asia

Chapter 17   Ernie’s good deed

Chapter 18   Ernie’s tennis match with Michiko

Chapter 19   Reporter’s interlude: I (The prime minister’s ears)

Chapter 20   John got lucky when Ernie fired him

Chapter 21   Ernie’s sixth and last book

Chapter 22   Dibble’s fighting cock

Chapter 23   Ernie and Laurette

Chapter 24   Ernie and the long-haired lama

Chapter 25   The Making of a combat correspondent — Joe Galloway

Chapter 26   In search of the Yeti

Chapter 27   Leon Daniel, The ‘Gold Standard’

Chapter 28   Ernie misses a big one

Chapter 29   The making of a journalist II, Neil Sheehan in Vietnam

Chapter 30   Saigon Romance

Chapter 31   Ernie and Roy

Chapter 32   Ernie’s sayonara from UPI: Was it hara-kiri?

Chapter 33   Hoberecht for President

Chapter 34   Reporter’s interlude II — Mims Thomason

Chapter 35   The Great American Press

Chapter 36   Laurette divorces Ernie, he marries Mary Ann

Chapter 37   The itinerant newsman, Bob Miller

Chapter 38   Ernie’s last days

Chapter 39   The obituary

Chapter 40   Letters after the fact

Chapter 41   Al Kaff remembers Ernie

Chapter 42   UPI and us

Chapter 43   Get it first, but first get it right

Chapter 44   Where are they now

Bibliography

Afterword

FOREWORD

I never liked to read forwards so I will keep this short.

This isn’t meant to be a biography. It is a collection of stories about Ernie Hoberecht (pronounced Ho-bright), a good old boy from Oklahoma, who had his 15-plus minutes of fame in Asia. It includes stories about some people who knew Ernie or worked for him.

Most of this book takes place in the mid-1940s to the 1970s. Communications in Asia, particularly outside of Japan, were still based on Morse Code and some radio teletype. A correspondent in Jakarta or Saigon could still put off those angry editors in the New York or London headquarters by saying your urgent message delayed or was undelivered. There were no cell phones or computers. Telex for journalists reached New Delhi in the 1960s.

(In 1960, Chinese First Premier Chou En-lai visited Nepal. During a news conference in Katmandu, he and Marshal Chen Yi, China’s foreign minister, bounced up and down denouncing the United States for its actions in Asia. It was good theater and foreign correspondents raced to the small cable office to send their dispatches. We learned later that we overwhelmed the Nepalese Posts & Telegraphs. Our terse, hard-hitting stories were bundled up and sent by plane to Patma, the nearest telegraph in India. My story, no longer timely, arrived in London three days later.)

Asia Ernie concerns a news agency or what is often called a wire service. A news agency collects news from around the world, edits it and sells it to newspapers, radio and television stations and today to governments, business and Internet subscribers. It is a competitive business and in Asia Ernie’s day, the competition between United Press (and its successor United Press International) and the Associated Press was fierce.

Newspapers and news agencies, notably UPI, were more relevant in the days when Ernie Hoberecht bounced around Asia.

CHAPTER 1

The end of the year festival

In 1962, when I was UPI bureau chief in New Delhi. India, I sent my boss in Tokyo, Ernie Hoberecht, a cable suggesting a story. It went something like this:

Hoberecht suggest eye cover end of world festival in Benares. should produce colorful copy and pictures. How please? Killen

Hoberecht was UPI’s vice president for Asia and overall in charge of news and business operations. Like a long line of UPI executives, he was a penny-pinching SOB. But with a sense of humor.

Ernie cabled back:

Killen OK your Benares trip. But just in case, buy only one-way ticket. Regards Hoberecht

That’s Asia Ernie. My boss for seven years.

41650.png

Ernie Hoberecht (Ho-bright) rolls the dice at the Foreign

Correspondentrs Club of Japan in Tokyo during the late

1940s. Looking on are Cecil Brownlow of the International

News Service (left) and famed World War II cartoonist Bill

Mauldin whose drawings often depicted weary soldiers

Willie and Joe. Sample caption: Willie and Joe lie in their

sleeping bags in the snow up against a log. "Remember

that warm, soft mud last summer?" Willie says.

CHAPTER 2

Better than Hemingway

Tokyo, Japan, 1956. The distinguished speaker, author James Michener, was perplexed by the question.

How do you compare the literary accomplishments of Earnest Hoberecht and (French philosopher and writer) Jean-Paul Sartre? the student asked. He pronounced Hoberecht as Ho-bright.

Wow. What a first question, Michener thought. Who the hell is Earnest Ho-bright? The name sounded German.

Scratching his bald head, Michener said he had been doing a lot of traveling and hadn’t been able to keep up with the young German writers.

His audience at Waseda University tittered.

I’m writing my thesis on ‘The Influence of Earnest Hoberecht on Modern Japanese Thought, a graduate student told him. I’m really surprised you didn’t even know that Hoberecht was an American.

Another student jumped in. Earnest Hoberecht is America’s greatest writer. He’s been famous since 1945. In my thesis I prove he’s America’s most significant modern novelist.

Michener said he was sorry he couldn’t give an opinion on, what’s his name? Ho-bright?

A few days later, Michener attended a round table of Japanese intellectual leaders. A professor asked him, Do you consider the short stories of Earnest Hoberecht superior to those of Ernest Hemingway?

That did it. Michener decided he had to meet and talk to this fellow whose name was pronounced Ho-bright. At the time Michener was enjoying great popularity from his books. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had turned his Tales of the South Pacific (1947) into a spectacular Broadway success and movie (South Pacific). In all, he was to write more than 40 books that covered subjects ranging from Asia to the Holy Land to Poland, to Colorado, to Texas and Hawaii before his death in 1997 at age 90.

A Navy historian in World War II, Michener was a good listener, and he particularly liked to listen to reporters. Friends remember him in the bar of the Tokyo Press Club, sitting quietly and listening.

He would hear old Asia-hands talk about their best stories, their girl friends, their time fighting wars or in covering them. If a correspondent told too many war stories, one of the men in the bar would signal the bar tender to take down a battered metal helmet and hand it to the talker. The embarrassed speaker usually ended his soliloquy.

One correspondent told Michener of how he and Hoberecht were aboard a Navy ship, covering the shelling of Hokkaido in 1945. I cabled my story home but nobody read it because Ernie really passed a miracle. He told of shells whining through the air, cutting furrows across the rice paddies and ricocheting through grass-roofed villages. He described old men in wooden sandals fleeing the fires. The carnage was terrible and the effects upon Japanese morale devastating. If you’re ever going to bomb anything, let Ernie describe it.

Michener said he was intrigued by such comments and those of Japanese students and professors He was assured by his friends at the Press Club that Ernie was his own best source. So he tracked down Hoberecht in his third floor office in the old brick Mainichi Building near Yuraku-cho station.

Ernie talked and talked, and Jim listened and listened. Michener then wrote the Earnest Hoberecht story, which covered a four- page insert in Long Island Newsday. It was titled America’s Greatest Author and published Feb. 23, 1957.

Michener portrayed Hoberecht, a native of Watonga, Oklahoma, as talkative, both boastful and self-deprecating, humorous, well-dressed, and even sometimes baffoonish. But he spelled Ernie’s first and last names correctly and Ernie loved every word of it. Hoberecht obtained hundreds of copies of the four-page broadside and passed them out to all takers. (A reprint is on the Internet under UPI history.)

Michener wrote that Hoberecht was a tall, warm, good-looking, immaculately dressed young man in his early thirties. He was wearing a flashy tie, his trade mark, a pin-stripe suit with wide lapels, and highly polished tan shoes. His thick hair was sandy red and he sported a trim mustache, an infectious smile, a malacca cane and a ten-gallon Texas hat. (Most people don’t remember a cowboy hat. Ernie usually wore a homburg or a fedora.) For the record, Hoberecht was 5-feet-11 and weighed 160 pounds in his younger years.

The two got off to a rocky start.

Hoberecht proclaimed, I am the general manager of the greatest news agency in Asia.

Associated Press? Michener asked.

Hoberecht clutched his stomach as if he had been hit by a machine-gun.

Associated Press!, that has-been outfit, Hoberecht shouted. In other parts of the world, the AP may have a certain local standing but in my territory (Asia) it’s United Press all the way. I am known in these parts as the man who humiliated AP.

That out of the way, Ernie emphasized that his name was pronounced Ho-bright and his first name was spelled with an A. All over Japan you’ll meet people who know of only two Americans. General MacArthur and Earnest Hoberecht.

He then readily explained to Michener his enormous popularity as a writer in Japan.

Hoberecht was one of the first journalists into Japan after the Pacific war ended in 1945. He claimed to have touched down in Japan two days ahead of MacArthur and he was among the many correspondents at the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945. Ernie watched from a gun turret that overlooked the signing ceremony.

41667.png41688.png

Reproduction of Membership Card, Hoberecht

Fan Clubs of Japan

Friendly and outgoing, Hoberecht made some early contacts in Tokyo, including publisher Zenichi Matsunaga. One day in 1946, Matsunaga told him he could become rich and famous if he could get the rights to publish American books in Japan. The Japanese, Matsunaga said, were desperate to learn about American life. The trouble was the Allied occupation forces would not allow any foreign books, particularly American books, into Japan.

Ernie was stunned by what Matsunaga said. No foreign books, no American books? That’s crazy. He contacted a U.S. military officer who acknowledged it was true. No sir, the officer said, the Japanese were not to going to be exposed to American character faults as chronicled by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street or the prose of John Dos Passos, whose early works had a positive view of leftist American labor leaders. The censorship edict also made clear that no mention of censorship was to be published. In other words, American books were banned but no one was talking about it officially.

Following Matsunaga’s idea, Hoberecht decided to write a book in English and have it translated into Japanese and published in Japan. He believed such a book would sell to an eager Japanese public without U.S. military objection. And Ernie loved to write.

So, during the day, Hoberecht worked for United Press and wrote for the Japanese public at night. His first book, Tokyo Diary, was an autobiographical account of a newsman’s first six months in U.S.-occupied Japan. He dictated the book to a Japanese secretary, who had been born and educated in the United States. Her English transcription was in turn translated into Japanese.

Tokyo Diary was a mild success. Publisher Matsunaga urged Ernie to write another book, a romantic novel about present day Japan. He introduced Hoberecht to Masaru Fujimoto, who before World War II had been U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grews’ personal translator. Hoberecht, Matsunaga and Fujimoto got together and planned his next book, Tokyo Romance.

The plot centered on a foreign correspondent and his courtship of a beautiful Japanese movie actress. ‘’The Japanese women were crazy to find out how American men made love,’’ Hoberecht told Michener. The story included a murder mystery with the reporter as the prime suspect. For conflict it had a Japanese movie studio forbidding the actress to date an American, as well as some thoughts on cross-cultural marriage. At the end, the reporter is exonerated, he marries the Japanese actress and her studio forgives her and picks her for the starring role in an important Japanese film.

I dictated it page-by-page after work to Suzie Matsuoka, a nisei who worked as a secretary for United Press, Hoberecht said. He would then deliver his manuscript page-by-page to Matsunaga. I finished in 27 days. Matsunaga, in turn, had each page translated into Japanese by Yasuo Okubo, who was well-known in Japan for his rendering into Japanese the works of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Agatha Christie, and Henry Miller.

Okubo also was the man who had plagiarized Gone With the Wind into a Japanese setting. Okubo was a brilliant young man, Ernie said.

Hoberecht acknowledged, It’s possible that he may have taken liberties with my words. You know, his Japanese translation may have been a lot better than my original English.

Tokyo Romance also had nine full-page water color illustrations by artist Foujita Tsuguharu, who traveled the world and whose paintings were in several museums outside Japan. Hoberecht called him a wonderful illustrator. His dream-like line drawings often showed the two lovers, the American journalist and the Japanese movie star, hand-in-hand.

Japanese journalist Eiichiro Tokumoto read the Japanese and the English language renditions of Tokyo Romance in 2015. He noted these differences from Hoberecht’s English text:

From Page 16, translator Okubo inserted five pages about how the people in London and Chongqing, (nee Chungking, the Nationalists wartime capital in China) welcomed the end of World War II.

From Page 87, he inserted two pages of conversation between two correspondents on democratizing Japan. They agreed that Japanese needed to understand that democracy affords rights and requires duties on the part of the citizens.

From Page 116, Okubo added four more pages of conversation on how Japanese and Americans can promote mutual understanding.

Overall, journalist Tokumoto said he felt Tokyo Romance gave a good snapshot of Tokyo in the early days of the occupation (1945-52.)

Just before publication, there was a hitch. Ernie had neglected to ask United Press for clearance, a company requirement for staffers who want to publish outside the news agency wires. Tokyo Diary apparently was published without permission.

Homburg in hand, Ernie approached his boss, Miles Peg Vaughn, the UP vice president for Asia, for guidance. Vaughn had published his own book, Covering the Far East in 1936, detailing 10 years in reporting news about Asia.

Say, Peg, er-Mr. Vaughn, Ernie began. I’ve written a novel that is about to be published in Japanese. I wasn’t aware until today that I needed clearance from UP. What should I do? Since the book is fiction, there certainly is nothing about it that could be found objectionable.

Vaughn told Ernie to write a letter asking the New York office for clearance. In the letter, dated Oct. 9, 1946, Hoberecht said the book had been passed by U.S. military censors without a single line, word or period being changed. He asked the New York headquarters to send me clearance by urgent telegram and noted the book will ... serve to give United Press good publicity.

Tokyo Romance became an instant success, selling more than 300,000 copies. Author Earnest Hoberecht, the Watonga wordsmith, was a literary sensation in Japan.

Hoberecht organized his own Fan Clubs with young Japanese girls (tabi-soxers) treating Ernie like a rock star. Each member carried a club card that had Hoberecht’s picture and the phrase Hoberecht Fan Club of Japan. On the back, written in Japanese and English:

I am a member of the Hoberecht Fan Club of Japan. I read all Hoberecht books and sing all Hoberecht songs. I tell my friends to read and sing them too.

Tokyo Romance contained 240 pages and sold for 18 yen or $1.20. TIME magazine reported in its Oct. 28, 1946 edition, that Hoberecht was rolling in yen — which he could not spend outside Japan (because of monetary restrictions.) No matter, Ernie was a hot author.

There were a few detractors in Japan. One AP correspondent said, Well, Japan lost the war, didn’t they? They should expect to suffer, Michener reported. Hoberecht said, Somebody told me that a Harvard man in the Civil Information and Education Section (of the Allied military government) had his secretary translate the first two chapters (back into English). When he read them, he shouted, ‘Stop! Stop! The War Crimes Commission is trying the wrong man.’

Hoberecht laughed at his critics and quickly turned out a book titled 50 Famous Americans that included some of his father’s friends in Oklahoma and the president of United Press. He authored a book on western etiquette for the Japanese, (The well-bred person never attracts attention to himself in public, either on a streetcar or in public buildings. He talks in a moderate voice. he does not laugh loudly and he is courteous.) He asked his parents in Watonga, to send him all the essays and manuscripts he had written in high school and college. They were translated and published in Japan as The Hitherto Unpublished Short Stories of Earnest Hoberecht.

His most prodigious effort was titled Shears of Destiny, a book that he had written before he came to Japan. It was my best novel, Ernie told Michener. "A book that sets the readers straight about the Okies in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The Okies weren’t really from Oklahoma, They were no good and useless people from Georgia, Texas and Mississippi and were just passing through Oklahoma when Steinbeck wrote his novel. Shears of Destiny made that clear, and Hoberecht lamented that this book was never published in the United States.

I’m not criticizing Steinbeck, you understand, he told Michener. "Does no good for one literary man to knife another, but I did have