by Gore Vidal
That was yesterday. Today, any scrutiny of the three powerful myths which Americans and their helpers in other lands are obliged to accept will set off fire alarms. In The Golden Age (largely covering the years 1940–50 as viewed from Washington, D.C., by our rulers), I make three cases involving presidential whoppers. One, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose domestic policies—the New Deal—I admire) deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking us at Pearl Harbor. Why? As of 1940, he wanted us in the war against Hitler, but 80 percent of the American people wanted no European war of any kind after the disappointments of 1917. He could do nothing to budge an isolationist electorate. Luckily for him (and perhaps the world), Japan had a military agreement with Germany and Italy. For several years, Japan had been engaged in an imperial mission to conquer China. Secretly, FDR began a series of provocations to goad the Japanese into what turned out to be an attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor, thus making inevitable our prompt, wholehearted entry into the Second World War. There is a vast literature on this subject, beginning as early as 1941 with Charles A. Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of War and continuing to the current Day of Deceit by Robert B. Stinnett, now being argued about in the U.S. Stinnett gives the most detailed account of the steps toward war initiated by FDR, including the November 26, 1941, ultimatum to Japan, ordering them out of China while insisting they renounce their pact with the Axis powers; this left Japan with no alternative but war, the object of the exercise.
The second great myth was that Harry Truman, FDR’s successor, dropped his two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because he feared that a million American lives would be lost in an invasion (that was the lie he told at the time). Admiral Nimitz, on the spot in the Pacific, and General Eisenhower, brooding elsewhere, disagreed: the Japanese had already lost the war, they said. No nuclear bombs, no invasion was needed; besides, the Japanese had been trying to surrender since the May 1945 devastation of Tokyo by U.S. B-29 bombers.
The third great myth was that the Soviets began the Cold War because, driven by the power-mad would-be world conqueror, Stalin, they divided Germany, forcing us to create the West German republic, and then, when Stalin viciously denied us access to our section of Berlin (still under four-power rule as determined at Yalta), we defied him with an airlift. He backed down, foiled in his invasion of France, his crossing of the Atlantic, and so on.
These are three very great myths which most historians of the period knew to be myths but which court historians, particularly those with salaries that are paid by universities with federal grants for research and development, either play down or flatly deny.
David Hume tells us that the Many are kept in order by the Few through Opinion. The New York Times in the U.S. is the Opinion-maker of the Few for some of the Many; so when the paper draws the line, as it were, other papers in other lands take heed and toe it. In The Golden Age, I revealed, tactfully I thought, life in Washington during the decade from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor to the Cold War and Korea. No one needs to know any history at all to follow the story. Even so, one American reviewer was upset that I did not know how “dumbed-down” (his phrase) Americans were, and how dare I mention people that they had never heard of, such as Harry Hopkins?
But I am a fairly experienced narrator, and each character is, painlessly I hope, explained in context. Unfortunately, the new pop wisdom is that you must only write about what the readers already know about, which, in this case at least, would be an untrue story.
The New York Times hired a British journalist, once associated with The New Republic, a far-right paper unfavorable to me (it is a propagandist for Israel’s Likudite faction, much as The Washington Times supports the line of its proprietor, Korea’s Dr. Sun Moon). The hired journalist knew nothing of the period I was writing about. He quotes an aria from Herbert Hoover which he thinks I made up, when, as always with the historical figures that I quote, I only record what they are said to have said.
Hoover regarded, rightly or wrongly, FDR as in the same totalitarian mold as he saw Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin: “You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts.” Our best modern historian, William Appleman Williams, in Some Presidents: Wilson to Nixon (1972), noted that it was Hoover’s intuition that, in the first third of the twentieth century, the virus of totalitarian government was abroad in the world, and that Hitler in his demonic way and Stalin in his deadly bureaucratic way and FDR in his relatively melioristic way were each responding to a common Zeitgeist.
For a right-wing hired hand this should have been a profound analysis, but the reviewer fails to grasp it. He also ignores Hoover’s astonishing aside: “What this country needs is a great poem.” Most damaging to the integrity of my narrative (and the historians I relied on), the reviewer declares, without evidence, that . . . But let me quote from a letter by the historian Kai Bird which, to my amazement, The New York Times published (usually they suppress anything too critical of themselves or their Opinion-makers):
Twice the reviewer dismisses as “silly” Vidal’s assertion that Harry Truman’s use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was unnecessary because Japan had been trying for some months to surrender.
Such assertions are neither silly nor . . . a product of Vidal’s “cranky politics.” Rather Vidal has cleverly drawn on a rich and scholarly literature published in the last decade to remind his readers that much of what orthodox court historians have written about the Cold War was simply wrong. With regard to Hiroshima, perhaps Vidal had in mind Truman’s July 18, 1945, handwritten diary reference to a “telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace.”
Or this August 3, 1945, item from the diary of Walter Brown:
Brown notes a meeting with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Admiral W. D. Leahy, and Truman at which all three agreed, “Japs looking for peace.” . . . But Truman wanted to drop the bomb; and did. Why? To frighten Stalin, a suitable enemy for the U.S. as it was about to metamorphose from an untidy republic into a national security state at “perpetual war,” in Charles A. Beard’s phrase, “for perpetual peace.”
I fear that the TLS review of The Golden Age battened on the inaccuracies of the New York Times review; your reviewer is plainly an American neoconservative who enjoys crude reversals of categories. The American hard Right has no known interest in the people at large, and a reverence for the 1 percent that pays for their journals and think tanks. He refers to my “universally contemptuous Leftism” which involves “sneering in its disregard for ‘the lower orders . . . the rather shadowy American people.’ ” This is the oldest trick in bad book-reviewing. A novelist writes: “ ‘I hate America,’ shrieked the Communist spy.” This will become, for the dishonest book-reviewer, “At one point, the author even confesses that he hates America.” But I know of no “Leftist” (define) who sneers at the people, while no populist could. Rather I concentrate on what has been done to the people by the 1 percent through its mastery of the national wealth and made-in-the-house, as it were, Opinion. Your reviewer even misunderstands my own sharp conclusion that an era ended, happily in my view, when the traditional American servant class ceased to exist, thanks to the 13 million of us in the armed services and the full employment of women in the Second World War. That some of my sillier grandees mourn this state of affairs is a part of the social comedy of the narrative, admittedly not of quite so high an order as the inadvertent comedy of Rightists affecting unrequited passion for Demos.
The final myth is that Stalin started the Cold War by dividing Germany into two sections, while trying to drive us out of our sector of Berlin. I’ll quote the best authority, thus far, on what Truman was up to after Potsdam when he met Stalin, who, after Yalta, had expected to live in some sort of reasonable balance with the U.S. Here is Carolyn Eisenberg in Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949 (1996):
With the inception of the Berlin
blockade, President Truman articulated a simple story that featured the Russians trampling the wartime agreements in their ruthless grab for the former German capital. The President did not explain that the United States had [unilaterally—my adverb] abandoned Yalta and Potsdam, that it was pushing the formation of a Western German state against the misgivings of many Europeans and that the Soviets had launched the blockade to prevent partition.
This great lie remains with us today. Please no letters about the horrors of the Gulag, Stalin’s mistreatment of the buffer states, and so on. Our subject is the serious distortions of the truth on our side and why, unless they are straightened out, we are forever doomed to thrash about in a permanent uncomprehending fog. Good morning, Vietnam!
The attitude towards truth on the part of Truman’s administration was best expressed by his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in the memoir Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969). It was Acheson who launched the global empire on February 27, 1947. Place: Cabinet Room of the White House. Present: Truman, Secretary of State Marshall, Under Secretary Acheson, a half-dozen Congressional leaders. The British had, yet again, run out of money. They could not honor their agreements to keep Greece tethered to freedom. Could we take over? Although Stalin had warned the Greek Communists that their country was in the U.S. sphere and they should therefore expect no aid from him, Truman wanted a military buildup. We had to stand tall. But Marshall failed to convince the Congressional leaders. Acheson, a superb corporate lawyer and a most witty man, leaped into the breach. He was impassioned. The free world stood at the brink. Yes, at Armageddon. Should the Russians occupy Greece and then Turkey, three con-tinents would be at risk. He used the evergreen homely metaphor of how one rotten apple in a barrel could . . . Finally, were we not the heirs of the Roman Empire? Was not the Soviet Union our Carthage? Had not our Punic Wars begun? We dared not lose. “America has no choice. We must act now to protect our security . . . to protect freedom itself.” It was then agreed that if Truman addressed the country in these terms and scared the hell out of the American people, Congress would finance what has turned out to be a half-century of Cold War, costing, thus far, some $7.1 trillion.
In retrospect, Acheson wrote, cheerfully, “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” After all, as he noted, it was the State Department’s view that the average American spent no more than ten minutes a day brooding on foreign policy; he spends less now that television advertising can make anything clearer than truth.
Today, we are not so much at the brink as fallen over it. Happily, as of this election, we were not at our old stamping ground, Armageddon. Rather, we were simply fretting about fibs involving drunken driving and the true cost of that mother-in-law’s medicine as opposed to the pampered dog’s, when, had the candidate been true to his roots, he could have found, in a back alley of Carthage, Tennessee, two pinches of cheap sulphur that would have dewormed both mother-in-law and dog in a jiffy.*
The Times Literary Supplement
10 November 2000
* JAPANESE INTENTIONS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Sir,—I am in Clive James’s debt for the succinct way that he has assembled what must be at least 90 percent of all the Received Opinion having to do with the start and finish of the American–Japanese war of 1941–45 (Letters, November 24). Were it not for occasional Jacobean resonances, one might suspect that Dr. Barry Humphries had been working overtime in his bat-hung lab, assembling yet another Australian monster: a retired Lt. Col. with a powerful worldview fueled by the tabloid press of Oz.
James begins briskly: Vidal has an “admonitory vision” to the effect that the “leadership class” of the American empire thinks “that Washington is the center of the world. Unfortunately, Vidal seems to think the same.”
Indeed they do. Indeed I do. Indeed, Washington has been the uncontested global center for most of the twentieth century, which I tend to deplore—Washington’s primacy, that is. In a recent book, The Golden Age, I concentrate on the decade 1940–50 when the New World gave birth to the global arrangement.
I start with the convergence on Washington of more than 3,000 British agents, propagandists, spies. Yes, I was there. At the heart of an isolationist family that “entertained,” as they used to say, everyone, I personally observed the brilliant John Foster in action. Foster was attached to Lord Lothian’s British Embassy. He enchanted the Washingtonians while secretly working with Ben Cohen, a White House lawyer, to draft the Lend-Lease agreement which proved to be the first blow that President Roosevelt was able to strike for England. Residents of that other center, Canberra, no doubt have a different tale to tell.
I make the hardly original case that Franklin Roosevelt provoked the Japanese into attacking us for reasons that I shall come to presently.
James, armed to the teeth with Received Opinion (henceforth RO), tells us that Japan was provoked into war by the Japanese Army, “which had been in a position to blackmail the Cabinet since 1922 and never ceased to do so until surrender in 1945,” brought on, as RO has it, by gallant Harry Truman’s decision to drop a pair of atomic bombs. None of this conforms to what we have known for some time about the internal workings of Japan’s intricate system of governance, not to mention our own. There was indeed a gung-ho Japanese military war party that was busy trying to conquer as much of China as possible en route to South-East Asia where the oil was. There was also a peace party, headed by Prince Konoye, who was eager, as of August 1941, to meet with FDR, who kept postponing a face-to-face discussion to sort out differences. Had FDR been interested in peace in the Pacific, he could have met with Konoye, much as he was secretly meeting with Churchill on a soon-to-be-related matter.
James correctly notes that we had broken Japan’s diplomatic code, Purple, but he seems unaware that, by early October 1940, we had also broken many of the Japanese military codes, specifically parts of the Kaigun Ango: the twenty-nine separate naval codes which gave us a good idea of what their fleet was up to during the entire year before Pearl Harbor. RO assures James that, if FDR wanted war, he would not have sent the Emperor, on December 6, a cable whose only message seemed to be a wistful hope that the Japanese would not try to replace the defeated French in Indo-China. James seems ignorant of the context of that message.
Here it is. On Saturday, November 15, 1941, General Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, called in various Washington newspaper bureau chiefs. After swearing them to secrecy, he told them that we had broken Japan’s naval codes, and that war with Japan would start sometime during the first ten days of December. On November 26, Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State, presented Japan’s two special envoys to Washington with a ten-point proposal, intended, as Hull told Secretary of War Stimson, “to kick the whole thing over.” Of FDR’s ultimatum, Hull later remarked, “We [had] no serious thought Japan would accept. . . .” What was the proposal? Complete Japanese withdrawal from China and Indo-China, Japan to support China’s Nationalist Government and to abandon the tripartite agreement with the Axis. FDR had dropped a shoe. Now he waited for the Japanese to drop the other. They did. RO has it that we were taken by surprise. Certainly, FDR was not. But apparently the unwarned military commanders at Pearl Harbor were, and 3,000 men were killed in a single strike.
RO always had a difficult time with motive. Since FDR could never, ever, have set us up, why would the Japanese want to attack a wealthy continental nation 4,000 miles away? Fortunately, RO can always fall back on the demonic view of history. As a race, the Japanese were prone to suicide. Hardly human, they were a bestial people whose eyes were so configured that they could never handle modern aircraft or bombsights. As a young soldier in the Pacific, I was, along with everyone else, marinated in this racist nonsense. But should this demonic reading of the Japanese character not be true, one must wonder why the Japanese military, with a difficult war of conquest in China that was using up their wealth and energy in
every sense, would want to provoke a war with the United States so far away? RO has had sixty years to come up with an answer; and failed to do so.
Today, no one seriously contests that FDR wanted the U.S. in the war against Hitler. But 60 to 80 percent of the American people were solidly against any European war. In November 1940, FDR had been elected to a third term with the pledge that none of America’s sons would ever fight in a foreign war “unless attacked.” Privately, more than once, he had said to others that the Japs must strike the first blow or, as he put it to Admiral James O. Richardson (October 8, 1940), “as the war continued and the area of operations expanded, sooner or later they would make a mistake and we would enter the war”; hence, FDR’s series of provocations culminating not in a Japanese “mistake” but in the ultimatum of November 26 that left the Japanese with no alternative but war, preferably with a “sneak” knockout attack of the sort that had succeeded so well against Russia in 1904, at Port Arthur. Did FDR know that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, where much of our Pacific fleet was at anchor? Or did he think they would strike at some lesser venue like Manila? This matter is, yet again, under scrutiny.
James’s RO is correct when he notes that the German-Italian-Japanese tripartite agreement was of a defensive nature. They were not obliged to join in each other’s offensive wars. Why Hitler declared war upon the U.S. is still a “puzzle,” according to no less a historian than Dr. Henry Kissinger, not a bad historian when not obliged to gaze into a mirror (cf. his Diplomacy).