Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (17 page)

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 to 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.”

Stinnett’s own feelings about his material were made clear in the preface. “As a veteran of the Pacific War, I felt a sense of outrage as I uncovered secrets that had been hidden from Americans for more than fifty years.” What Stinnett claimed to have discovered was documentary proof that American intelligence had had access to Japanese naval codes at the time of Pearl Harbor and had therefore been in a position to anticipate and hence to prevent the attack. “Previous accounts,” said Stinnett, “have claimed that the United States had not cracked Japanese military codes prior to the attack. We now know this is wrong. Previous accounts have insisted that the Japanese maintained strict radio silence. This too is wrong. The truth is clear: FDR knew.”
²⁹