How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them. John F. Kennedy got shipwrecked in the Solomons (an island there is named after him). Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Silver Star, personally given by MacArthur, for “gallantry” as an observer in New Guinea. Richard Nixon served in air logistics in MacArthur’s theater. Gerald Ford gamely puttered around nearly every island group in the ocean on a light aircraft carrier. The twenty-year-old Lieutenant George H. W. Bush was shot down over Chichi Jima in the Bonins. Bush—the plane’s sole survivor—got rescued by a submarine. He was extremely lucky. Four other airmen shot down later in the same area were captured and became the unfortunate victims in the highest-profile documented instance of Japanese wartime cannibalism.