“The portrait’s austere aesthetic mirrors Drake’s wartime persona—a man caught between truth and deception, public duty, and personal loyalty.”
By Hamilton Bean
THE cover of Nimitz’s Newsman: Waldo Drake and the Navy’s Censored War in the Pacific (Naval Institute Press, 2024) tells a story before a single page is turned.
A charcoal pencil portrait—stark, rough, unsentimental—shows a Naval Reserve officer gazing out, his expression tense but composed—a slight snarl conveys a hint of menace. The image captures the contradictions at the heart of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s first Public Relations Officer (PRO), Waldo Drake, and was drawn sometime between July 1942 and July 1943 by famed American illustrator and combat artist McClelland Barclay.
The portrait is more than a compelling likeness. It is a historical artifact of wartime cooperation between two men who shaped the Navy’s public image through vastly different mediums: Drake through press releases, communiques, letters, and the censorship of correspondents’ stories; Barclay through painting and combat illustrations.
Barclay, renowned in the interwar period for his “Barclay Girls” and high-style magazine covers, became a Naval Reserve officer in 1938. Drake was appointed PRO for the Pacific Fleet in 1941. But the two men had known each other for years. In 1932, Barclay was already active as an illustrator and recognized in military-adjacent circles. A respected maritime reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times since 1922, Drake routinely included Barclay’s artwork in his Shipping News column.
By the time he sketched Drake in Pearl Harbor, Barclay had turned his talents to wartime documentation. But on July 18, 1943, he would be declared missing in action after the transport ship he was aboard, an LST-342, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine somewhere in the Solomon Islands. In the decades that followed, Barclay’s paintings and posters for the Navy would become iconic.
A Hidden Portrait Emerges
My discovery of the portrait of Drake reads like a scene from historical fiction. During the final stretch of research for the book in 2022, I received a mailing from Drake’s granddaughter, Jennifer Drake Schroeder. Amid a small clutch of family photographs was a delicate sheet of paper wrapped carefully in layers of tissue. As I slid it free, a face emerged—charcoal-shadowed, resolute, perhaps even a little intimidating. It was Drake’s “grim visage” (as one of his Navy colleagues had teased him). Below the sketch was Barclay’s thank you note. I had learned from archival research that Barclay had known Drake, but I hadn’t expected an original, unknown portrait to surface. Its emergence was a moment of connection between two men—one an artist missing in action; the other the Pacific Fleet’s first PRO nearly erased from public memory.
An October 14, 1941, letter from the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral H. E. Kimmel (almost certainly drafted by Drake) confirms Drake’s interactions with Barclay. Kimmel noted forwarding a photographic copy of a Kodachrome negative of his own Barclay portrait to Admiral C. W. Nimitz at the Bureau of Navigation in Washington DC. That gesture of preservation points to the importance of both men: Barclay, the Navy’s visual chronicler; and Drake, the Fleet’s unacknowledged conduit to the American public.
The Unseen Face of a Censored War
As PRO, Drake lived in the shadows. Barclay sketched Drake as a thank-you for facilitating access during his Pacific Fleet assignment. As the book explains, Drake had been appointed PRO just in time to manage the chaos following the Pearl Harbor attack. Drake’s dual role—as the Fleet’s promoter and censor—put him at odds with the press and occasionally out of sync with his own chain of command. He reviewed—and frequently redacted—war dispatches, drawing the ire of correspondents who found him brusque, secretive, and overly controlling. At one point, they even composed mocking songs about him (Drake had an unusually raspy voice that served as the target for correspondents’ gibes).
Barclay’s portrait does not soften those edges. Drake’s jaw is set, his eyes unsparing. The image shows a man burdened by the impossible task of balancing transparency with operational secrecy. The portrait’s austere aesthetic mirrors Drake’s wartime persona—a man caught between truth and deception, public duty, and personal loyalty.
Recovering Hidden Figures of the Pacific War
When I showed the portrait to the Naval Institute Press team, the response was immediate.
“This needs to be the cover,” everyone agreed.
The image was not only visually striking but symbolically perfect: a record of a little-known but pivotal figure in the Pacific War, rendered by an artist whose own story had been similarly obscured by history.
In deciding to donate the original portrait to the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, in 2025, I completed a circle. The portrait, once buried in a family archive, will now be publicly accessible, returned to the historical stage. Museum staff enthusiastically accepted it for preservation and future display—both physical and digital. Visitors, encountering the portrait, might ask: “Who was this man?” In seeking the answer, they might learn not only of Drake’s role in shaping Admiral Nimitz’s public persona but also of Barclay’s brilliant service.
The portrait is more than a cover. It is an invitation into the book’s argument: that behind the Pacific War’s usual narrative lies a network of obscure collaborations and friendships—some barely visible, some vanished. By placing Barclay’s sketch on the cover, Nimitz’s Newsman honors two such figures, each working in the margins to define what Americans saw, read, and believed about the Navy’s war in the Pacific.
Dr. Hamilton Bean is the author of Nimitz’s Newsman: Waldo Drake and the Navy’s Censored War in the Pacific. A professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver, he specializes in the study of communication and security. He has applied communication theory to the study of counterterrorism, disinformation, intelligence, and public diplomacy. He has earned multiple awards for scholarship from the National Communication Association.