During the intensive training in Virginia necessary for the absorption of vital technical and military information, Johnny and Raymond’s mother lived in a darling little cottage just outside Wellville in Nottoway County, where she had found a solid connection for black-market booze and gasoline and a contact for counterfeit red points to keep those old steaks coming in. Johnny moved out of the staging area and sailed with his outfit for Greenland in December, 1942, and Raymond’s mother went back home to handle the PR work for her man. The recurring theme she chose for the first year of propaganda was hammered out along the basic lines of “Blessed is he who serves who is not called: blessed is he who sacrifices self to bring about the downfall of tyrants that others may prosper in Liberty.” It was solid stuff.

She got herself a women’s radio show and a women’s-interest newspaper column in the Journal, the biggest paper in the state and one of the best in the country. There were a lot of specialized jobs going for the asking. Mainly she read or reprinted all of Johnny’s letters on every conceivable variety of subject, whether he sent her any letters or not.

The official records show that Johnny was an intelligence officer in the Army, but his campaign literature, when Raymond’s mother ran him for governor, revealed that he had been “a northern Greenland combat commander.” About ten years after the war was over, well after Johnny’s second term as governor, the Journal did a surprising amount of careful research on Johnny’s record, at considerable expense. They dug up documents, and men who had served with Johnny, and they virtually reconstructed a most careful, pertinent, and accurate history of his somewhat distorted past. A public relations officer who had been attached to Iselin’s unit, a Lieutenant Jack Ramen, now of San Mateo, California, told the Journal in 1955 on a transcribed, long-distance-telephone tape recording, which was monitored by the Journal’s city editor, Fred Goldberg, and witnessed by a principal clergyman and a leading physician of the state, of the lonely incident that had lent credence to the popular belief that Johnny had seen combat while in service.

“Yeah,” Ramen said. “I remember the day we were both at a tiny Eskimo settlement above Etah there on Smith Sound and Johnny was looking to make some kind of good trades on furs with the natives when a supply ship the name of Midshipman Bennet Reyes came in, covered all over with ice. They were having propeller trouble and they were due in at Etah to unload groceries and while they were standing by for repairs the skipper told them to test the guns, all the guns, everything. We find out about it when Johnny and I go aboard; we were off duty, and Johnny always operates under orders from his wife to make friends no matter where. He actually brought the skipper of that ship the stiffest piece of seal-skin you ever saw and made such a big thing out of it that the guy probably even kept it. He give Johnny a half gallon of pure grain alcohol to show his appreciation, and we needed it. Man, was it cold. I can never ever explain to anybody how cold it was all the time I was in the Army and, for what reason please don’t ask me, the cold absolutely does not ever seem to bother Johnny. He used to say it was because his nose was radioactive. Actually, he was always so full of antifreeze that he couldn’t feel much of anything. Anyway, Johnny hears these Navy guys cursing about having to test all the guns and he asks them if they will mind if he fires a few rounds because he has always wanted to shoot a gun of some kind, any kind. They look at each other quick, then say sure, he can fire every single gun on the ship if he likes. So he did. And he took some pretty rugged chances because if the Martians had attacked or he had slipped on the deck he could have hurt himself. Anyway, I had a job to do which was called public relations, so I wrote a little routine story about the ‘one-man battleship’ which in a certain way was strictly true. It had a certain Army flavor, and after all they weren’t paying me to do public relations for the Navy, you know what I mean? I slugged it ‘From an arctic outpost of the U.S. Army,’ and I wrote how one lone Army officer had fired all the guns of a fighting ship on top of the world where all the forgotten battles are fought and where the Navy fighting men had been put out of action by the crudest enemy of all, the desperate, bitter cold of the arctic night, and how when the last gun had been stilled not an enemy form or an enemy plane could be seen moving on the ancient ice cap, tomb of thousands of unknown fallen. You know. It was filler copy. Not strictly a lie, you understand. Every fact was strictly factual all by itself but—well, it was what they always said was very, very good for morale on the home front, you know what I mean? Anyway, I forgot about the whole thing until Johnny came around with a fistful of clippings and a letter from his wife which said my story was worth fifty thousand votes and he was supposed to buy me all the gin I could hold. I liked gin at the time,” Ramen concluded.

With characteristic candor, in his autobiographical sketch in the Congressional Directory of 1955, Johnny claimed “seventeen arctic combat missions,” but when testifying in 1957 in a legal proceeding that was attempting to investigate various amounts of unusual income he had received, both as to amount and source, Johnny said (of himself): “Iselin was on thirty-one combat missions in the arctic, plus liaison missions” and added inexplicably that the nights in the arctic region were six months long. “Iselin saw enough battle action to keep him peaceful and quiet for the rest of his days.” Raymond’s mother had taught Johnny to call himself Iselin whenever testifying or being interviewed, on the principle that it constituted a continuing plug for the name at a time when Johnny was being quoted on land, sea, and in the air, as often and as much as the New York Stock Exchange.

The question of combat would not permit any settlement. When Raymond’s mother had Johnny make formal application for the Silver Star, presumably because no one else had made application for him, in a claim supported by “certain certified copies from my personal military records,” it attracted an apoplectically outraged letter of complaint from a constituent, bitter about the violation of propriety in which Johnny had received a medal at his own request. Raymond’s mother dictated, and Johnny signed, a return letter that contained this brave turn of phrase: “I am bound by the rules which provide how such awards shall be made and as much as I felt distaste there just wasn’t any other way to do it.”

However, as the years carried Big John and Raymond’s mother forward through their national and international duels on behalf of a more perfect America, the most disputed part of Johnny’s record continued to be the “wound” he most blandly claimed to have suffered in military combat. Although he did not receive the Purple Heart and although the former Secretary of the Army who reviewed his personnel file disclaimed any Iselin wound in action, when Big John was asked at a veterans’ rally why he wore built-up shoes (how else the big in Big John?) Governor Iselin said he was wearing the shoes because he had lost most of his heel in arctic combat. There is disagreement among those who heard him at that time as to whether he said “lost most of my foot” or a lesser amount of tissue.

The relentless Journal, in the year of its gallant but futile attempt to discredit Johnny in a meaningful sense, uncovered the personal journal of an officer who had served with Johnny all during the tour, a Francis Winikus, who subsequently made a reputation as an authority on migratory elements of population in Britain and Europe. Under the date of June 22, 1944, the Winikus diary threw a white and revealing light on the circumstances leading to Johnny’s wound by recording: “Johnny Iselin has become possessed by the idea of sex. To get that interested in sex on the top of this ice cap is either suicidal or homosexual, on its surface, but Johnny isn’t either. He is a persistent and determined zealot. There is a new Eskimo camp about three miles across that primordial field of ice under that gale of wind which carries those flying razor blades to cut into the face from the direction of the village. There are women there. Everybody knows that and everybody agreed it was a very good thing until we walked, secretly and one at a time, with ice grippers tied to our shoes, across that shocking three-mile course in cold worse than the icy hell the old German religions called Nifelheim and came up to the igloos down wind and lost all interest in sex for the rest of the war. I was exhausted when I made the run, but I came back faster than I went over, to get away from that smell. It is the special smell of the Eskimo women and there is no smell like it because they wash their hair in stored urine, they live sewed up in those musty skins, and they eat an endless diet of putrescent food like fish heads and whale fat.