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Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
May 25, 2001
THE SECRET OF PEARL HARBOR
FDR's role exposed � in 1944
Today's
column is an introduction to today's "Spotlight," John T. Flynn's classic
pamphlet The
Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, which you can check out here.
http://www.antiwar.com/rep/flynn1.html
The
smoke barely had time to clear before a dark cloud of intrigue and suspicion
formed around the circumstances leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
When the shock had worn off, questions began to be asked, at least by the most
sober and realistic Americans: why had the US military been taken by surprise,
and who, the Congress and the public wanted to know, was responsible?
John
T. Flynn was
one of the first to stand up to the war hysteria, defy the atmosphere of political
intimidation, and start asking questions. Flynn was an old-style liberal
journalist,
a former columnist for The New Republic, author of God's Gold (1932), a best-
selling book on the rise of the Rockefeller oil fortune, and
also Men
of Wealth: the Story of Twelve Significant Fortunes from the Renaissance to
the Present Day (1941), who had been purged from the precincts of "respectable"
journalism for his unrelenting opposition to US entry into World War II. Flynn
labored mightily to avert that disaster, joining with others � conservatives,
mostly, and nascent libertarians � in the antiwar America First Committee,
writing, speaking, rallying and lobbying to stop FDR's drive to war.
In the wake of
Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee disbanded, and the "isolationists"
were driven practically underground, hounded by the government, driven out of
politics and journalism, and in some cases prosecuted for "sedition." Flynn,
however, would not be cowed. He wrote two scathing pamphlets, The Truth About
Pearl Harbor (1944) and The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (1945),
that raised the question for the first time: did FDR have advance warning of
the Pearl Harbor catastrophe? Flynn answer was yes.
It is amazing
how much he gleaned from contemporary accounts � in spite of the repressive
wartime atmosphere that allowed the President to avoid a real investigation
� and it's nothing short of astounding how he was able to cut like a searchlight
through the cloud of obfuscating murk and get at the essential truth. As it
was, given what we now know, his conclusions were fairly mild. Flynn makes the
case that FDR had every reason to expect the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor,
that he ignored the advice of his generals, and that he deliberately bottled
up the fleet there. He reveals that the Japanese code had been cracked, and
that the diplomatic messages being sent back and forth between Tokyo and its
various embassies had been intercepted by the British, delivered to the Americans,
and decoded. But what he didn't know � couldn't know � was that much
more than that had been intercepted. As revealed in Robert Stinnett's book,
Day
of Deceit, a whole series of military messages sent by Japanese commanders
betrayed the day and the hour of the attack � and Stinnett shows that FDR
had to have known this. Flynn couldn't have had access to the thousands of pages
of documents � recently released under the provisions of the Freedom of
Information Act � that prove FDR's foreknowledge, and that of top figures
in his administration. But Flynn saw the pattern of deception, fifty years ago,
even if he couldn't have known the full extent of it. He is the father of Pearl
Harbor revisionism, the first writer to collect the evidence and indict an American
President for a heinous war crime � one committed against his own soldiers and
sailors.
Originally a supporter
of the President, Flynn became one of FDR's bitterest, most relentless critics:
his book, Country
Squire in the White House, so enraged its subject that FDR wrote to
one editor, at the Yale Review, demanding that Flynn be "forever barred"
from the pages of the "respectable" media. Flynn's 1948 book, The Roosevelt Myth, is
the definitive study of Roosevelt the opportunist
and autocrat; Flynn's 1944 volume, As
We Go Marching, cited the fascist proclivities of the New Deal in wartime.
Yet in concluding that the Pearl Harbor affair was the result of a "miscalculation,"
Flynn was giving the President far too much credit. As Stinnett makes all too clear:
instead of being a miscalculation, the Pearl Harbor disaster was a very
carefully calculated catastrophe, one orchestrated as much from Washington as
from Tokyo. "When the attack came," writes Flynn, "[FDR] was appalled and frightened.
He dared not give the facts to the country. To save himself he maneuvered to
lay the blame upon Kimmel and Short." If the President was appalled, it was
at his own handiwork, but there is no record of his fear. Harry Hopkins, his
top aide � and,
as we now know, a Soviet agent � reported that the night before, when
told that the Japanese had rejected his ultimatum, the President had said simply
and quite matter-of-factly, "This means war."
But if the enormity
of FDR's deception was inconceivable to even such a staunch opponent of the
President as Flynn, still he managed to glean the broad outlines of it: Flynn
knew something was very wrong about the circumstances surrounding the
biggest disaster in US military history, and he courageously took up the cudgels
on behalf of historical truth. It is true that, as Flynn said, FDR dared not
give the facts to the country. For half a century, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel
and General Walter Short were blamed for the disaster and the deaths, while
the man who set them up went down in the history books as the "Soldier of Freedom."
But now, all these years later, the truth is coming out at last. Congress officially
exonerated Kimmel and Short in 1998, and Senator Joe Biden, in his speech to the
Senate, described the great injustice done to them as a classic case
of scapegoating:
"These officers
were publicly vilified and never given a chance to clear their names," declared
Biden. "If we lived in a closed society, fearful of the truth, then there would
be no need for the President to take any action today. But we don't. We live
in an open society. Eventually, we are able to declassify documents and evaluate our
past based on at least a good portion of the whole story. One of our greatest
strengths as a nation comes from our ability to honor truth and the lessons
of our past.. . . I can not accept that there is a reason for continuing to
deny the culpability of others in Washington at the expense of these two officers'
reputations fifty-seven years later."
But if Kimmel
and Short weren't responsible for US vulnerability at Pearl Harbor, then who
was? In his speech, Biden said that the burden of guilt must be "shared"
� but between who and whom?
Flynn's trenchant
pamphlet was prescient in its conclusion that FDR had to have known a good deal
about the Japanese plans. Aside from his prescience, however, the author of
The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor was brave beyond measure: for this was
wartime America, where fear of "sedition" suppressed virtually all dissent,
and Flynn, whose work had appeared in The New Republic, Collier's,
and Harper's, now found himself confined to a few conservative publications,
such as the Readers Digest � and the Chicago Tribune, whose
publisher, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, was the great enemy of the New
Deal and the journalistic champion of America First. It was McCormick who printed
the first of Flynn's Pearl Harbor articles, on October 22, 1941, and this was
reproduced in pamphlet form as The Truth About Pearl Harbor (New York:
Privately printed, 1944). When the war ended, the "national security" dodge
that had let the administration stonewall on the Pearl Harbor question was no
longer applicable, and the cry for an investigation went up, led by Flynn and
the Tribune. On September 2, 1945, the Tribune printed another
piece on Pearl Harbor by Flynn � which we have posted as today's Spotlight
article � that contained what the editor called "the blackest charge
ever made against an American." Addressing his readers, the editor exhorted:
"Read it. Read it in full. In occupies a good many columns in today's Tribune.
That space would not have been made available if the report had not been of
such transcendent importance. We call on true Americans everywhere to join us
in seeing that the nation is told how it was carried into the war."
Today, as the
myth of Pearl Harbor is invoked by FDR's idolators � in
Hollywood as well as Washington � we offer it to you with that same sense of urgency.
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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