Impassioned and increasingly desperate. Gradually, as the Battle of Britain was fought and won, and as Churchill came to personify defiance in the face of tyranny, Roosevelt was winning his political battle to supply America’s democratic ally. Polls showed that a large majority of Americans wanted to see the defeat of Nazism, even if they didn’t actually want to fight. Symbolizing this, the Lend-Lease Bill was passed in Congress in March 1941 by 60 to 31 in the Senate and 260 to 165 in the House. In September 1941, Charles Lindbergh, the effective leader of America First, fought back with a speech in Iowa. It expressed, in the most developed way, his sense of who exactly was behind the disastrous slide into armed confrontation:
The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire . . . These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence . . . It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany . . . But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.15
The speech was a disaster. It included sentiments that might be commonly expressed in private but were too ugly for public consumption. Years afterward, the American writer, academic, and muscular liberal Arthur Schlesinger was asked whether in his opinion the Des Moines speech had destroyed America First. He replied that the movement had been shaken “very severely.” He went on, “There are a lot of people in the America First Committee, like John T. Flynn for example, Norman Thomas, others who were really shocked by that speech and by its implications.”
Shocked perhaps, but not necessarily by the sentiments. Lindbergh’s own journals, published in 1970, suggest that his colleagues weren’t as far away from sharing his opinions as Schlesinger suggests. Take this paragraph from the entry for Thursday, September 18, 1941:
John Flynn came at 11:00, and we talked the situation over for an hour. Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines, but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn’s attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private. But apparently he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is done.16
Flynn’s dissent from Lindbergh’s demonology then was not about the facts but about the advisability of stating them publicly. In fact, Flynn, too, thought that there was a concerted and underhanded attempt at work to seduce the United States into armed struggle. In December 1940, he had told an AFC rally in Chicago, “The plain and terrifying fact is that this great and peaceful nation is in the grip of one of the most subtle and successful conspiracies . . . to embroil us in a foreign war.”
And there was almost nothing, in the view of Lindbergh, Flynn, and others, that the infinitely unscrupulous Roosevelt was not prepared to do. Three weeks after Des Moines, Lindbergh confided to his journal that “regardless of the attitude of our people, it is a question as to whether the president will force us into war by actions and incidents which will make it unavoidable. He is in a position where he can force war on us whether we want it or not.”17 When, nine weeks later, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh wrote in his journal, “Phoned Gen. [Robert] Wood in Boston. His first words were, ‘Well, he [President Roosevelt] got us in through the back door.’ ”18
Roosevelt Knew
According to Flynn and many like him, Roosevelt had finally achieved the world war he had always wanted, the war he had been plotting for the last eight years. But the consequences of Pearl Harbor for America First were disastrous. It was now the AFC—the prophets, the enlightened peacemakers—not Roosevelt who were being reviled for their lack of patriotism. Pearl Harbor took some explaining, even to themselves. Furthermore, there could be no chance of rehabilitation, let alone eventual political victory, if the true nature of Roosevelt’s duplicity were not exposed. There had been defeats for the movement along the way, of course, including the obstinate public sympathy in America for its anglophone relation across the Atlantic. But the one event that, by itself, had meant war had dropped on them all from out of the blue heavens of a mid-Pacific sky, and had blown America First apart as surely as it had destroyed the Arizona, the Utah, and the Oklahoma. It was with Pearl Harbor that the assault on the seemingly invincible Roosevelt would have to start.
Such an assault was never going to be easy. For the American people, Japanese perfidy was to blame for the disaster of what we might now call 12/7. Even so, war or no war, the Republicans had elections to fight in 1944, and Pearl Harbor had been, at the very least, a chapter of incompetencies. And while early inquiries had discovered the fault to be largely that of the local commanders, Admirals Kimmel and Short, the subsequent agitation by these men and their supporters against this conclusion suggested a possible line of attack. By the summer of 1944, a decision had been made by the Republicans to make Pearl Harbor an election issue. On September 11, 1944, a Republican congressman from Indiana even claimed that Washington had known from Australian sources that a Japanese carrier fleet had been heading for Hawaii but had neglected to inform the hapless admirals.
In October of the same year, shortly before the election, John T. Flynn published a thirty-two-page pamphlet, The Truth About Pearl Harbor, which he then expanded a year later, after the death of Roosevelt in April 1945. Flynn’s thesis was important in that it added an extra dimension to the charge of presidential incapacity. It had, of course, been a blunder to “bottle” the fleet up in a vulnerable anchorage, a blunder to “strip” Pearl Harbor of its defenses, and a blunder not to warn Kimmel and Short that the serious deterioration in relations between Japan and America made some kind of attack quite likely. But Flynn added a new ingredient on top of incompetence, one that went beyond even deliberate carelessness. He charged Roosevelt with the specific intention of procuring just such a Japanese attack in order to bring America into the war. In other words, Roosevelt had conspired to provoke the exact action that he publicly so desired to avoid. Specifically, Flynn charged:
By January 1, 1941, Roosevelt had decided to go to war with Japan. But he had solemnly pledged the people he would not take their sons to foreign wars unless attacked. Hence he dared not attack and so decided to provoke the Japanese to do so.
He kept all this a secret from the Army and Navy. He felt the moment to provoke the attack had come by November. He ended negotiations abruptly November 26 by handing the Japanese an ultimatum which he knew they dared not comply with. Immediately he knew his ruse would succeed, that the Japanese looked upon relations as ended and were preparing for the assault. He knew this from the intercepted messages.19
In Flynn’s mind, Roosevelt had miscalculated where the attack might fall. Flynn speculated—albeit in terms suggesting certainty—that Roosevelt had anticipated a first Japanese assault against Singapore or just possibly the American bases in the Philippines or on Guam. “But if only British territory were attacked,” Flynn asked, “could he [Roosevelt] safely start shooting? He decided he could, and committed himself to the British government.” Not wanting to appear overprepared for war lest this spoil his case, Roosevelt decided to keep his military chiefs in the dark. But when Pearl Harbor and so many ships were lost, the president was “appalled and frightened.” To save himself, Roosevelt “maneuvered to
lay the blame upon Kimmel and Short,” acting ruthlessly to destroy their reputations and to silence those who might exonerate them. “Now,” concluded Flynn, “if there is a shred of decency left in the American people they will demand that Congress open the whole ugly business to the light of day.”20
There were some obvious difficulties with Flynn’s argument. First, it rested on the assumption that the Japanese needed to be provoked into making a surprise attack and a sudden declaration of war. Second, there was the absurd risk involved in provoking an attack: a risk that you might be taken utterly by surprise and defeated—not at all (even for the perfidious Roosevelt) the object of the enterprise. This Flynn dealt with by referring to the intelligence that the administration had with regard to Japanese intentions.
A gift from the gods had been put into Roosevelt’s hands. The British government had broken one Japanese code. It proceeded to hand over to the State Department the messages between Tokyo and various foreign representatives which it intercepted . . . Therefore on November 6, Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were playing their last card; that they would make no further concession and he knew also the very date they had set for action—November 25.21
On December 1, charged Flynn, a British intelligence report arrived in Washington telling of how Japanese aircraft carriers had left Japanese home waters.
All this information was in the hands of Hull and Roosevelt. Nothing that could happen could surprise them—save undoubtedly the point of the first assault . . . Roosevelt, the Commander-in-chief, who was now assured of the attack which would bring him safely into the war, went off to Warm Springs to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday.22
For many years, these assertions formed the broad outline of the accusation against Roosevelt and the basis of the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory. Believed by a number of Republicans and advocated by historians such as the America Firsters Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles A. Beard, the Flynn version of the story also attracted some military men, many of whom felt that Kimmel and Short had been badly treated.
For one celebrated American writer, this view of events was to persist for sixty years. Gore Vidal’s novel The Golden Age, published in 2000, featured both Roosevelt’s attempt to goad the Japanese into hostilities and the prewar “convergence on Washington of more than 3,000 British agents, propagandists, spies whose job it was to undermine the position of the anti-war movement.” “Yes, I was there,” Vidal wrote in defense of his thesis later that year. “At the heart of an isolationist family that ‘entertained’ as they used to say.”23 And, as we have seen, campaigned.
In May 2001, the New York Review of Books carried an exchange between Gore Vidal and Ian Buruma, a writer and specialist on Japan, concerning the prelude to war. Vidal was elegantly unpleasant about Buruma’s acceptance of the notion of a warlike Japan. Citing the efforts of the peace faction in Tokyo, Vidal demanded, “Why is it, if we were not on the offensive, that so small and faraway an island as Japan attacked what was so clearly, already, a vast imperial continental power? You have now had over sixty years to come up with a plausible answer. Do tell.”
Buruma’s response was to cite the evidence, not least the series of Japanese imperialist and unilateral actions, each of which had demanded some kind of American response. As relations worsened in late 1941, a Japanese imperial conference was convened. One participant summed the conference up: “If we miss the present opportunity to go to war, we will have to submit to American dictation. Therefore, I recognize that it is inevitable that we must decide to start a war against the United States.” As to the “small and faraway island” (with its significant population and substantial armed forces), Buruma quoted a Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, who explained that “our candid ideas at the time were that the Americans, being merchants, would not continue for long with an unprofitable war.” Ideology and hubris had combined to bring about a miscalculation on the part of the Japanese leadership. Whether Vidal thought the Japanese could win was beside the point; the fact seems to be that they thought they could.24
The Triple Conspiracy
One well-known historian was particularly persistent in his attacks on Roosevelt in the postwar period. Former America Firster Harry Elmer Barnes edited, in 1953, a seven-hundred-page collection of essays under the title Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (the subtitle being A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath), in which eight authors gave various and overlapping accounts of how Franklin D. Roosevelt had deceived America into abandoning neutrality, provoked the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, embarked upon an unnecessarily brutal war in which the Allies behaved as badly as, if not worse than, the Axis powers, and ended up selling out American interests to Stalinist communism at the conferences in Yalta and Potsdam. And all of this because of the false belief (signaled in the book’s title) that only out of constant warfare could domestic peace be secured. Barnes also first developed the idea of the triple conspiracy. His belief was that, in addition to provoking the Japanese, Roosevelt had also been warned of almost the exact hour and place of the supposed surprise attack, and had decided not to pass the warning on lest defensive measures led to the attack being aborted and his plan foiled. Or as Barnes put it, “It appeared necessary [to Roosevelt] to prevent Hawaiian commanders from taking any offensive action which would deter the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor which, of necessity, had to be a surprise attack.”25
Barnes thus took Roosevelt out of the category of scheming liar, into which he had been put by Flynn and others, and placed the still-revered late president firmly in a new grouping—mass murderer and infernal manipulator. The problem, however, for Barnes and others, was the overwhelming improbability of anyone taking such a risk as to invite enemy air attack on his undefended capital ships. Apart from a series of rumors and conjectures, the Harbor conspiracists just didn’t have any substantial evidence. Where, for example, was the proof that U.S. intelligence had cracked Japanese naval (as opposed to diplomatic) codes? But in 1981, on the fortieth anniversary of the attack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Toland published Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, in which he claimed to have that important new evidence.
According to Toland, Dutch intelligence sources in the Far East had passed on information about the attack to Washington, and had received in return indications that the United States already knew an enemy fleet was en route for Hawaii. And an anonymous sailor—later revealed to be one Robert Ogg—who had worked in the intelligence office of the Twelfth Naval District headquarters in San Francisco told Toland that he had intercepted Japanese radio signals from which he had been able to plot the location of the carrier force as it headed toward Hawaii. Ogg said that he had passed this information on to his superiors and believed that they, in turn, had passed it to Washington. On this basis, Toland concluded that FDR was guilty, and then asked his readers to “imagine if there had been no war in the East. There would have been no Hiroshima and perhaps no threat of nuclear warfare. Nor would it have been necessary for America to have fought a gruelling and unpopular war in Korea and a far more tragic one in Vietnam which weakened [the] U.S. economy and brought bitter civil conflict.”26 I include this passage because, as partial hindsights go, this is hard to beat in its ambition and speculative range.
But even Toland’s new evidence was more than problematic. Ogg’s evidence is directly contradicted by Japanese sources, who claim that enormous efforts were made by the task force to maintain radio silence. (For obvious reasons. After all, even if there was a Rooseveltian plot, no one has yet claimed that the Japanese were in on it. They presumably were working on the assumption that, if discovered, they would be attacked.) To ensure against error or sabotage, the radios had been disabled, and the operators left in Japan. What was more, it was pointed out by the editors of At Dawn We Slept, Gordon W. Prange’s magisterial history of the attack on Pearl Harbor, that in order to guarantee a successful Japanese surprise attack, the president would have needed t
o confide in the local U.S. commanders and persuade them to allow the enemy to proceed unhindered.27
The historian Stephen Ambrose took up this theme in a 1992 New York Times piece about conspiracy theories:
About Pearl Harbor one must ask could Roosevelt, by himself, have kept information about an imminent attack from the commanders in Hawaii? Of course not. Teams of men were involved in breaking the Japanese diplomatic code in 1941; admirals and generals in Washington got the intelligence and took it to the President. They would have had to join him in a conspiracy. Can anyone believe the admirals would have allowed their men and battleships to go down without a protest? . . . MOST of all, the thesis that Roosevelt knew beforehand that there would be an attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 breaks down when Roosevelt’s actual policy is understood. That policy, in December 1941, was to avoid war with Japan until Nazi Germany had been defeated. He did not take the back door to war; the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor solved no problem for him, but rather made it worse. On Dec. 8, he asked Congress to recognize that a state of war existed with Japan—the war he did not want, at least not yet—but he did not ask Congress to declare the war he did want, against Germany. It was Hitler, not the Japanese, who solved Roosevelt’s problem. On Dec. 11, in the craziest of all his loony decisions, Hitler declared war on the United States.28
But what if, despite all these objections and counter to all logic and experience, it were proved beyond most reasonable doubt that Washington really did know? In 1996, the National Security Agency transferred five thousand or so files from the records of the U.S. Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall in Virginia to the U.S. National Archives. It was the first major release of documents relating to the time of Pearl Harbor. Four years later, in the spring of 2000, journalist and former sailor in the U.S. Navy, Robert Stinnett, published Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. Stinnett’s book, based on seventeen years of research and study of the newly released papers, was well received by reviewers in the quality press. Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times Book Review that it was “difficult, after reading this copiously documented book, not to wonder about previously unchallenged assumptions about Pearl Harbor” (though readers of this chapter may wonder what those “unchallenged assumptions” actually were); Rupert Cornwell of the Independent in London took the view that “the case put together by Stinnett is more than persuasive”; and Tom Roeser of the Chicago Sun-Times provided the publishers with their paperback cover blurb by announcing, “Day of Deceit is perhaps the most revelatory document of our time.”
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 12