Missouri’s Last Battle: 4 Cities Fight for Berth

With the dark waters of the Pacific Northwest licking its steel skin, the battleship Missouri drifts in silence in a corner of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard like a patient captain waiting out a squall. Harry Truman once called it “the finest ship afloat,” but today the Mighty Mo--the site of Japan’s World War II surrender to the United States in 1945--is in mothballs at the shipyard in Bremerton, Wash. Last January, Pentagon officials removed the battleship from the naval registry and announced that it would become a public museum.

Long Beach, San Francisco, Honolulu and Bremerton have staked claims to the ship, raising millions apiece to pay for refurbishing and mooring the Navy’s 887-foot pride and joy. Navy Secretary John H. Dalton is set to decide the winner by summer’s end.

In the months since the Missouri hit the market, nonprofit booster organizations from each city have sworn their undying loyalty to the Navy, called in their political big guns to lobby the Pentagon, and vied for veterans club endorsements as if running for elected office.

Why the damn-the-torpedoes tactics?

To hear the rival boosters tell it, the warship will be an icon of national and civic pride to its new home. The ship will also be a mecca for veterans and other visitors who will stay in hotels, shop and otherwise pump out tax revenue while in town.

From the battlefields of Virginia to the Alamo, memorial administrators testify that the hell of war makes for heavenly tourism. All four cities battling for the Missouri project say the ship will draw more than a million paying visitors annually, wherever it drops anchor.

Last summer, while the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Japanese surrender, the ship took on 216,000 visitors in the three months it was open for tours in Bremerton.

In analyzing the applications, the Navy will look closely at how each nonprofit organization plans to tow the ship from Bremerton, moor it and protect it from storm damage, said Capt. Gordon I. Peterson of Naval Sea Systems Command. The competing organizations also must show how they would operate the Missouri as a museum without slipping into debt, he said.

After the Navy picks a site, the losers have 60 days to appeal the decision. And they may console themselves with the knowledge that three other World War II battleships--the New Jersey, the Wisconsin and the Iowa--may also be up for grabs.

From Honolulu, the USS Missouri Memorial Assn. argues that its central Pacific location will draw tourists from the United States, Japan and Australia. Hawaiian boosters have secured about $6.5 million in loans and donations to tow and refurbish the ship, which they plan to berth near the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, allowing visitors to learn about the start and end of U.S. involvement in the war.

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But Honolulu’s rivals said a memo from the National Park Service office at the Arizona suggests that the Missouri wouldn’t fit in. “The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor is the sole historic event interpreted by the National Park Service at the USS Arizona Memorial,” the memo said. “The USS Missouri would overshadow the memorial and is historically abstract to the story of Pearl Harbor as she was not built here, was not here on December 7, and is out of interpretive context.”

Other nonprofit organizations competing for the ship question whether Japanese tourists in Hawaii would visit a symbol of their country’s defeat.

In Honolulu’s corner is Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Navy’s budget. Rivals fear that Inouye may put the squeeze on the Pentagon to name his state the winner of the Mighty Mo sweepstakes.

But San Francisco, never to be out-politicked, has exercised its muscles inside the Beltway too.

“We’ve had politicians . . . contact the president and encourage him to send it to San Francisco,” said James L. Lazarus, a consultant to the nonprofit Missouri Allied Forces Memorial and former aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

Lazarus added that Truman’s daughter, Margaret, has endorsed his city as the site for the vessel, which she christened during the war.

San Francisco would showcase the ship near the submarine Pampanito and the liberty ship Jeremiah O’Brien. Lazarus’ organization has raised more than $1.8 million for start-up costs, and would prefer that the Navy make up its mind posthaste, the better to let the city feature the vessel in its annual waterfront parade. If San Francisco’s plan has a major weakness, rivals say, it’s the weather.

Down the coast, sunny Long Beach argues that its rich naval history, coupled with its surging tourism, make it the best spot. The Missouri was towed from Bremerton to Long Beach during the 1980s and spent several years there being modernized. It was returned to Bremerton in 1992.

With the clock ticking, Ret. Navy Capt. Donald M. Budai, executive director of Long Beach’s Battleship Missouri Foundation, fired off a letter last month selling Long Beach as a show business nexus.

“The TV and movie [industries] use our area as the most used filming location in the world. They would have the battleship as a backdrop for thousands of shows/movies. The Navy would be receiving positive public relations daily at no cost,” Budai wrote.

Rep. Steve Horn (R-Long Beach) also has weighed in for the city in letters and phone calls to the Navy’s top brass.

Besides, Long Beach boosters say, the Mighty Mo belongs next to that other famed World War II hero, the Queen Mary, which served as a troop carrier.

Competitors respond that until this year, the Queen Mary was anything but a financial success, having lost millions since it opened as a tourist attraction 25 years ago. Budai says the foundation has access to $15 million in donations and loans to support the Long Beach plan.

Meanwhile, Bremerton officials are clinging to the beloved vessel, which has spent most of the past three decades in their shipyard. They have collected $6 million to outfit the Mighty Mo as a museum, and say they will draw from the tourist pool of nearby Seattle, which had 9 million visitors last year.

Led by the Economic Development Council of Kitsap County, city officials suggest that the Navy might do its own sailors a favor by keeping the Missouri right where it is. Home to 9,000 active-duty sailors and their families, Bremerton bills itself as the most die-hard Navy town of the bunch. (Bremerton High School’s fight song is “Anchors Aweigh.”)

Rivals scoff that the town of 43,000 is too small to support the costs and tourist base needed for the Missouri. Bremerton officials counter that in bigger cities, the battleship would become just another waterfront “trinket.”

“It would be crown jewel” in Bremerton, said W. Earle Smith, a retired captain and president of the development council.

He added that he hopes the Navy will choose the Mighty Mo’s future home “strictly on merit and keep politics out of it.”