As 1940 turned into 1941, prostitution was again back in the headlines with Public Safety Commissioner Eastwood complaining that the military police were failing to cooperate with his officers by refusing to share information with them about illegal activities. The Fort Lewis base commander responded to Eastwood’s complaints by again threatening to place Tacoma “off limits” to all military personnel.

The events that followed were the basis of one of Harry Cain’s favorite stories. The following version is taken from a taped interview he conducted with Miami public affairs radio personality Charles Kappes in March 1975. Cain called all thirty-one local madams into his office on the morning of July 25, 1941. “I was well prepared and in a good mood. They were all handsomely dressed—they should have been; they were all making a fortune—and I said, ‘Ladies, when you leave this office, you’ll be on your way back to close up. You’re done.’ Well, they were indignant, some screamed, some swore, and some threatened to go out into the neighborhoods. I told them, ‘If you do that, because of the difficulty in [customers] getting to you, your business is going to decline and your prices increase, and the local housewives are going to know where you are, and they’re going to come and complain to me, and I’m going to send the police out there [and] put you in the Bastille.’ This closure is for six months. If the venereal disease rate goes up during that time, instead of down, I’ll not only allow you to re-open, I’ll become a barker at your doors and encourage more trade for you.” Cain was so tickled with his success in cleaning up the brothels that he wrote an article about it in the December 1943 issue of the Journal of Social Hygiene, called “Blitzing the Brothels.” Its publication brought favorable attention to Tacoma and, not coincidentally, to Harry Cain.

Chapter 3, page 57 – 58

The Ardennes sector of the Allied front, an area of heavy forests and rugged, broken ground cut by deep ravines, narrow valleys, steep hills, and numerous streams about 130 miles northwest of Epernay, served as the dividing line between the U.S. First and Third Armies. Because it was such difficult terrain—a most improbable place to stage an attack in mid-winter—it was lightly defended by U.S. commanders who were facing severe troop shortages, even in their more active sectors.

Within hours, the U.S. 7th Armored and 30th Infantry Divisions were on the move to try to stop the German flood, but it was a case of too little, too late. The real problem was that there was virtually no pool of reserve manpower left on which to call. Eisenhower’s “broad front” advance to the Rhine had consumed men as fast as it had fuel. The only strategic reserve consisted of the still-depleted 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions of Ridgway’s XVIII Corps recovering near Rheims, more than a hundred miles away, in the middle of the worst winter on record.

To make matters worse, Ridgway and much of his staff (including Harry Cain) were in England reviewing the newly arrived 17th Airborne Division that was working up after its arrival in England. About 2:15 on the morning of December 18, Ridgeway received orders detaching his corps from the First Allied Air Army, attaching it to Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, and ordering him to concentrate his forces to meet the attack. Within the hour, Ridgway and his staff were on their way in fifty-five quickly commandeered troop transports to the front. Even before they could arrive in France, new orders were received detaching the 101st Airborne and sending it to the beleaguered VIII Corps in the Bastogne area. Ridgway was to take the 82nd Airborne to Werbomont, Belgium, about forty miles north of Rheims, in support of the 30th and 17th Divisions, which were falling back before the German onslaught.

All of a sudden, Harry Cain was right in the middle of a very hot war. There were no front lines. The 101st Airborne was soon surrounded at Bastogne. The Germans interdicted the route to Werbomont immediately after Ridgway and his staff had passed by. The weather was bitterly cold with blowing snow. No one knew who was a friend or a foe. Ridgway assumed command of the 7th Armored and the 30th Infantry Divisions that were trying, without success, to plug a gap in the Allied lines near St. Vith, through which the Germans were pouring with overwhelming force.

Cain found himself in the middle of the fighting but, amazingly, found time to write home about it in the early morning hours of December 19. “Yesterday in England; tonight a long and contrasting way from there. The papers have told you that Jerry is up to no good and we are here to sort of convince him that there isn’t any point in his trying to go in any other direction save backwards. It’s too early yet to determine if he is going to listen to our authority now or later on. I moved in today on a Belgian family of seven and their living room is my office, dining room and bed. Some of my men are packed about four deep on the kitchen floor and others are deeper than that in the hay loft. The family, all seven, are listening to the 9 o’clock news. They wonder if the rumor that Jerry will overrun us tonight is based on fact. [I] remember thinking a year ago in Italy that the war would be over by now and yet the pattern today is just about the same. Guesses are about a dime a dozen but I think we are on board for the last lap. To my mind, what happens in the next few days will have a definite bearing on the ultimate result.”

By the morning of December 20, Ridgway was able to create a thin defensive line that plugged the gap at St. Vith. Writing home again that night, Cain told Marj that he had said too much when he had written the previous night. “Enough to know in general where I am and that the fur is flying. This business is anything but gay, but I couldn’t wish to be anywhere else. That’s why I couldn’t wait for the election to be over so I could take a seat with the greatest guys on the globe. Living is simple. I don’t shave very often, or eat very much, or sleep on a bed, but I am well and vitally interested in living.”

The only war story Cain’s son, Buzz, remembers his father telling him occurred at this time. Cain said that he had been “pinned down” with many other guys for days near a disabled train. They had no water, but the train was loaded with champagne, which they used for both personal hygiene and liquid refreshment. “Dad was never able to drink champagne after the war, and he said that that experience was the reason why.”

The Americans were forced to retreat from St. Vith on December 23 when German forces streamed around their open right flank. Another hastily constructed defensive line finally held against intense and repeated German attacks. With major reinforcements now squeezing the German salient from both the north and the south, Ridgway went on the offensive, regaining the territory his units had just lost. By early January, the crisis had passed and by January 23, St. Vith had been recaptured and the Germans were streaming eastward in defeat. 

During the battle, Cain, without the benefit of staff, personally coordinated the activities of the other military government officers caught in the path of the German attack. As the Allies successfully re-grouped and started to push the Germans back, Cain worked with local civil authorities to coordinate assistance to the more than 100,000 terrified civilians who had been caught in the German breakthrough. According to his Legion of Merit citation, Cain “oversaw the evacuation, housing, clothing and feeding of 15,000 civilians without interference with the tactical situation and without dependence upon the military for supplies, transport or personnel.”

Chapter 6, pp. 106-108

In 1944, Cain had decided that he was a Republican after being recruited to run for the U.S. Senate, but his political philosophy had not been tested during that campaign. With Cain forced to remain officially silent because of army regulations, only one candidate—Warren Magnuson—was in a position to speak out on the issues. In some ways it had been an unknown blessing. When Cain ran again for the Senate in 1946, his political views became far better defined and more widely known. While he still called himself as a “conservative liberal,” his views had become more conservative and partisan, reflecting both the evolution of his own thought process and the influence of his new advisors—mostly conservative, small businessmen from Tacoma.

Only thirty-nine years old at the time of his election to the Senate, Cain’s background was devoid of legislative experience or any history of compromise and negotiation. He had spent only three and one-half years as an elected official. Tacoma’s form of government hadn’t encouraged interaction between officials; the military didn’t encourage its officers to engage in politics. Over time, Cain had developed a concept of public service and a belief in limited government, free markets, the sanctity of an individual’s civil and property rights, and personal responsibility. With limited experience in partisan politics, Cain believed that he had been elected to lead and elected to act on basis of his views (which he assumed to be the views of the majority of those who elected him). Cain believed that the times required action that he had been given the opportunity to act, and act he would! It is not clear that he really understood what lay ahead.

Chapter 7, p. 130

To the Eisenhower administration, of course, Cain was a “loose cannon” who was involving himself in matters outside of his area of responsibility and, in so doing, was not only being disloyal to the President who appointed him but was also causing a considerable public distraction away from the administration’s quiet efforts to distance itself from its anti-Communist critics.

An indication of the administration’s displeasure with Cain can be gathered from an exchange of notes between Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers, who would later serve as Attorney General and Secretary of State, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Rogers sent a copy of Cain’s earlier letter to Sherman Adams on to Hoover, asking him to return it to him “after you have had the agonizing experience of reading it.” Hoover sent it back the next day with a note, referring to the letter as a “diatribe written by ‘Wordy’ Cain” and commenting that no one in Washington had ever exceeded Cain’s use “of the personal pronoun, I.” A further indication of the displeasure of senior Justice Department officials with Cain can be found in an April 15, 1955, memo from Oran Waterman, head of the Justice Department unit responsible for designating subversive organizations, to his supervisor, David Irons, Chief of the Subversion Organization Section. In it, Waterman wrote that Cain’s attacks on the list had “caused serious disservice” and were “inimical to the interests of the internal security program.”

Chapter 11, page 227 – 228

[1] Harry P. Cain, audiocassette tape interview conducted by Charles Kappes on WNWS Radio, Miami, FL, March 12, 1979. Author’s collection.