Popular Culture Review 29.2
steered the discussion from one point to another and narrowed down the areas of disagreement between MacArthur and Nimitz . The only discordant note was Roosevelt ’ s health . ‘ He is just a shell of the man I knew ,’ MacArthur told his wife , Jean . ‘ In six months he will be in his grave ’” ( Quoted in Smith 2008 622 ).
Rigdon writes that they shifted back to the ship on July 29 , where FDR and his dog Fala were joyfully reunited . Fala had been required to spend the four days FDR was ashore on the ship , because of Hawaii ’ s quarantine regulations . “ Within an hour the cruiser was underway for the Aleutians .” The first port of call , Rigdon said , was Adak , “ a treeless island near the end of the island chain .” The voyage had been uneventful , “ except for foul weather much beyond my ability to describe ” ( Rigdon 1962 123 ). Decades later , the Alaska Dispatch News recalled that FDR had spoken “ at a lunch with about 160 servicemen .” It was “ August 3 , 1944 at the Naval Operating Base Adak ,” and there was “ a year of hard fighting left until the end of World War II . President Roosevelt [ had ] visited Alaska as part of a three-week journey to the Pacific , the only trip he ever made here ” (“ When the President Came to Dinner ” 2014 ).
Ridgon says that it was the “ visit to Alaska that brought Fala into the political campaign .” FDR ’ s political enemies had spread the story that Fala had been accidentally left ashore , and FDR had ordered a destroyer back to retrieve his dog� at enormous expense . “ The story was completely false ,” Rigdon verifies , “ but it grew and grew until it passed from one anti-Roosevelt narrator to another ,” with the expense�and the lurid details and consequences�growing with each telling . Moreover , as the story evolved , it came to incorporate a threat to national security , because “ he had detached a badly-needed fighting ship from war on Japan to bring him
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