Eugene G. Windchy
Eugene G. Windchy in 1967 left his position as the U.S. Information Agency’s Assistant Science Adviser to investigate the forgotten naval incidents that enabled United States participation in the Vietnam War. This led to his writing Tonkin Gulf, which was reviewed in the New York Times as "superb investigative reporting" (September 26, 1971).
Windchy wrote the New Republic’s analysis of the Pentagon Papers (August 7, 1971) and other articles for the Nation, Saturday Review, Atlantic, and the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. In another New Republic article (January 29, 1972) Windchy contested the settled academic opinion, among both historians and political scientists, that the president has constitutional authority to make war without the nation’s having been attacked. Windchy drew upon James Madison’s notes concerning the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to show that, in the absence of attack, only the Congress has the right to initiate war. He also debunked a State Department document that purported to show that on 125 occasions presidents had exercised the war power on their own initiative. These were insignificant incidents, and on one occasion the U.S. Navy actually fired on a U.S. Consulate.
After a Soviet warplane in 1983 shot down the Korean Airliner 007, Windchy wrote for the Washington Post an op-ed (October 19, 1983) that disputed the explanation accepted by the major American media and also by a book based on interviews with high Soviet officials. According to that explanation, the Soviets mistook the Boeing airliner for an Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane. Windchy’s op-ed gave reasons for why the Soviets must have known the target was a commercial airliner, and this opinion later was justified when the attacking pilot was interviewed by Izvestia and the New York Times.
When in Japan with the U.S. Information Agency, Windchy wrote a booklet on atomic energy that sold nearly one million copies. On a later assignment in Japan he helped Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer in his relations with Marxist-oriented magazines and often placed in them articles by the ambassador.
The author and his wife live in Alexandria, Virginia. A daughter resides with her family in Berkeley, California.