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Edith Rooks traveled from Seattle to Honolulu to say farewell to her husband as he prepared to take command of the USS
Houston
in Manila. Understanding the temperature of the times, Captain Rooks could not restrain himself from a moment of candor. He took stock of the developing crisis over China and told Edith that he would be unlikely to come home from this assignment alive. As his son would explain, “He said the power of the Japanese was far greater than what we could muster, and he did not expect to return.”
    The 1914 Naval Academy graduate, having made captain in February, was a star performer and seemed bound for flag rank. His assignment to the Asiatic Fleet flagship was for two years—the minimum length of sea duty to make him eligible for promotion to rear admiral. On August 28, Rooks found the
Houston
at Cavite Navy Yard in Manila and two days later relieved Capt. Jesse B. Oldendorf as her commander. The next day he wrote Edith and reiterated his mixed feelings. “It’s a shame to wish away time at our age, but two years is a long time, and I don’t look forward to it with pleasure.” In 1941 even a keen observer such as Rooks, long a student of geopoliticsand now able to observe the Pacific theater firsthand, had trouble teasing out the flow of events. “My opinion of the Jap situation keeps changing. If I understand the press reports coming out of Tokyo, they are making some very grave decisions right now. I think they will finally decide against war with us, but I certainly might be wrong.”
    In other writings, Rooks’s pessimism prevailed. His analytical mind told him that whatever her industrial advantages over the long term, America would not long stand up against a determined Japanese offensive in the western Pacific. He appreciated the Japanese Navy’s capabilities. Samuel Eliot Morison would write, “Few Allied naval officers other than Captain Rooks of the USS
Houston
believed the Japanese capable of more than one offensive operation, but they exceeded even his expectation.”
    If he did not wish away time entirely, Rooks marked its passing with the precision of a chronometer. “Well, September is almost gone,” he wrote Edith after a month in command of his ship, abandoning longhand and breaking in his new Underwood typewriter, acquired in Manila for forty-five dollars. “Day after tomorrow it will be one month since I took over the
Houston,
and two months since I left you in Honolulu. That makes two twenty-sixths of the time, or 1/13 gone. When you say it that way, it doesn’t sound so interminable, does it?”
    In time he seemed to realize the cumulative effect on Edith of reiterating his pessimism. In his correspondence to her during the ensuing months leading up to war, one can sense him doing penance for his earlier candor. “The longer they keep from striking, the less chance that they will start anything. For one thing, America is growing stronger every day,” he wrote on October 5.
    He told Edith he thought the Japanese would attack Siberia if they attacked at all. “They are really in what must be for them a very unsatisfactory position. An attack on Siberia will not solve their pressing need to obtain oil and other supplies. In a movement to the South, where such supplies are, they will inevitably be opposed by the combined power of the United States, the British Empire, and the Netherlands East Indies. If they make no move at all, our embargo will slowly but surely sap their economic and industrial strength and will probably ultimately defeat their effort in China.” Two weeks later he noted that “the Jap situation is sizzling this week end, with the fall of the cabinet, and with the torpedoing of ourdestroyer
Kearny
on the east coast. I suppose it means real trouble…. Well, come what may, I am ready for it.”
    For a short time still, the Philippine capital would be a sanctuary from the kind of chaos that was overtaking Shanghai. A few months into his tenure as