Pacific Story
The Idea Behind It
When Pacific Story premiered on NBC on July 11, 1943, the war in the Pacific was still very much in doubt. The show's creators, Jennings Pierce and Inez Richardson, built it around a clear premise: with Europe being torn apart, the Pacific basin was likely to emerge as the center of political and social change once the fighting stopped — and American listeners knew almost nothing about it. Pierce, who held the title of director of public service programs at NBC West, and Richardson, who came out of Stanford University, set out to fix that. The result was a Sunday evening series that ran for 182 episodes over nearly four years, touching on every nation around the Pacific Rim.
The scope was genuinely ambitious. Episode titles from the run give a sense of the range: "Indo-China: The Collapse of the French Empire in the Pacific," "Korea: Japan's Oldest Enemy," "Nehru of India: The New Man of the New World," "Opium: Curse of the Far East," "Japan's Robber Barons." The show moved through politics, culture, geography, and history — whatever a listener needed to understand why a given place mattered. NBC produced it in Hollywood under the network's public service programming division, using professional voice actors and expert writers, with the stated aim of better informing the American public about the Pacific situation.
The People Who Made It
Producer and writer Arnold Marquis shaped the series from the inside. Born in October 1901, Marquis had already worked as researcher, producer, and writer on the NBC program Unlimited Horizons before taking on Pacific Story, and he brought the same documentary instincts to the new series. After the show ended, he pursued a long-standing interest in Native Americans — his film series The Only Good Indian won the UCLA Award and is held in the National Archives.
The show's narrator was Gayne Whitman, born Alfred D. Vosburgh in Chicago in 1890. Whitman had been a working actor since 1904 and appeared in more than 200 films over his career. Radio listeners knew him as the title character in Chandu the Magician and as the narrator of Lassie and Strange as It Seems. He had changed his name during World War I, explaining simply that "1917 was not a good time to have a German sounding name." Music for the series was composed and conducted by Charles Dant.
Serving as consultant was Owen Lattimore, an American Orientalist who had edited the journal Pacific Affairs from 1934 to 1941, joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1938, and worked during the war as deputy director of Pacific operations for the Office of War Information. Lattimore had also served as an emissary to China under the Roosevelt administration. His expertise on Asia was exactly what the show needed, and he brought genuine authority to its framing. Guests on individual episodes included publisher Henry Luce and novelist Pearl S. Buck, both of whom had deep ties to the Pacific world.
What It Covered
The series mapped nearly every territory with a Pacific coastline or stake in the region's future. Countries profiled included Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Korea, India, Russia, and Burma, among many others. In June 1946, episode 154 was devoted entirely to the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll — one of the first opportunities American radio had to give the subject sustained attention. Around the same time, Pacific Story shifted into a United Nations thematic series, with episodes examining individual nations' roles in the emerging postwar order. "Russia Looks to East," "Burma Patriotic Front," and "Philippines Birth of a Nation" all aired in the summer of 1946, as the shape of the postwar Pacific was still being worked out in real time.
The final episode, broadcast January 26, 1947, was titled "The Marquesas: Last Episode." By that point the show had run 184 weeks, with two pre-empted, for a completed run of 182 episodes. Scripts from August 1943 onward are held at the Library of Congress as part of NBC's Hollywood scripts archive.
After the Broadcast
Owen Lattimore's post-war years took a dramatic turn. In March 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him in executive session of being "the top Soviet agent" in the United States — a charge that leaked quickly to the press. The Tydings Committee, formed to investigate McCarthy's accusations, found them to be "a fraud and a hoax." A second Senate subcommittee still subpoenaed Lattimore for further testimony, and the government eventually prosecuted him for perjury based on his Senate denials. U.S. District Judge Luther Youngdahl dismissed the indictment, calling the charges "formless and obscure," and all charges were dropped by June 1955. Lattimore went on to serve as the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds from 1963 to 1970.
Of the 184 episodes produced, 171 recordings are known to survive, with a combined running time of roughly 84 hours and 28 minutes. The surviving episodes were certified as accurately identified and labeled in August 2007. It is a substantial portion of a series that, for nearly four years, gave American listeners a weekly education in a part of the world that history was about to make unavoidable.