ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA
By GEORGE N. CROCKER
Earth is sick And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words Which States and Kingdom! utter when they talk Of truth and justice.
WORDSWORTH
Chapter VI
"IF I WERE A JAP"
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT had a particularly busy calendar on the last
day of July, 1941. It was one of those days that would whet the
vanity of any man and certainly that of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
in whom that "sixth insatiable sense," as Carlyle called it, was by
no means underdeveloped. It was a day replete with big manipulations,
half-veiled by oblique announcements issuing forth
from near the seat of power. These served to inform the public
that the man of destiny was up to something important.
To the White House, by invitation, came two men impressively
arrayed in uniforms of scarlet, blue, and olive drab, with
the Soviet hammer and sickle embossed in gold leaf on their visor caps. They were Lieutenant General Filip I. Golikoff,
deputy chief of staff of the Soviet Army, and his assistant, Engineer
General Alexander Respin. They were accompanied by
the Russian Ambassador, Constantin A. Oumansky, who introduced
them to the President. As heads of the Russian military
mission, it was their business in Washington to get military supplies
for the Soviet army.
On that day, the United States was technically at peace. The
Roosevelt administration had made no pretense of neutrality;
but it had not yet dared to remove the word "peace" from its
lexicon of rhetoric, for the public did not wish to enter the war The Nazi blitz on England had failed; in turn, bombs had been
dropped from hundreds of Royal Air Force planes on Hamburg
and Berlin, with telling premonition of devastation yet to come.
Hitler's legions, now in the sixth week of their unhappy gamble
in the east, had been checked on the approaches to Leningrad,
Moscow, and Kiev, and a Soviet counteroffensive was actually
underway in the crucial Smolensk sector of the long battle front.
German peace feelers, looking toward a rapprochement with
Britain, were being put forth in the neutral capitals of Europe.1 Communism, the Germans were insisting, was the real menace
to Western civilization.
After a lengthy visit, the Russians emerged from the White
House, obviously pleased. Whatever Mr. Roosevelt had said to
them· had been music to their ears. General Golikoff told inquisitive
reporters that he found it very "easy" to talk with President
Roosevelt on military matters. Perhaps General Galikoff
had not anticipated that Mr. Roosevelt would say yes to him
with such gusto or without attaching any strings to his commitment.
It was not so long ago that the League of Nations had expelled
General Golikoff's government for aggression against
little Finland or that his boss, Stalin, had joined with Adolf Hitler to wipe Poland off the map. So he may have expected a more
mitigated enthusiasm on President Roosevelt's part. Under the
circumstances, it is not surprising that the adjective "easy" should
have come to his mind in describing the conference.
It so.happened that on this same thirty-first of July, in faraway
Moscow, the President's perennial message-bearer and intimate,
Harry Hopkins, was having a three hour tete-a-tete with Marshal
Joseph Stalin. He was promising Stalin all possible American
aid. He had spent three hours with the Soviet dictator the previous
evening. Stalin was coolly confident. The Germans, said
he, had underestimated the strength of the Russian army, which
could mobilize three hundred and fifty divisions.
Stalin wanted American guns and other things, both immediately
and over the long run, but he made it plain that there
was more on his mind than just the defense of the soil of Russia.
Germany must be completely crushed, and to do that, America
would have to come into the war. He wanted Hopkins to give
Roosevelt that personal message. (Hopkins marked this part of
his report "For the President Only.")2
Hopkins did not ask Stalin what the Soviet Union intended to
do in the heartland of Europe after Germany was crushed, a
question which anyone with a perspective of European history
and an elementary understanding of geopolitics would have
known to be important. The excuses he proffered for some of the
delays which would be inevitable in furnishing Stalin the vast
quantities of supplies and equipment he wanted savored of apologies.
He offered even more than was asked for. "In return for
the offer of such aid," writes William C. Bullitt with consternation,
"he asked nothing."3 Sherwood's account, from Harry
Hopkins' own notes and report, bears this out.4
On this same day, the Germans had. something dour to say
about the visit of the American Santa Claus, in the person of
Harry Hopkins, to the Kremlin. While it ill behooved the Nazis
to speak of outrages and to don the robe of moral indignation,
they had not lived in uncomfortable propinquity to the fountainhead
of international Communism since 1917 without learning
some things about it which many Americans were to discover,
with painful embarrassment and at great cost, in the years
to follow. The authorized German spokesman, as quoted the
next morning in the New York Times, tossed out a ball which
Franklin D. Roosevelt did not dare try to catch. He charged that
Hopkins' offer of support to Soviet Russia made the United
States a party to the Soviet Union's efforts to thrust Communism
into the heart of Europe.
The implicit prediction in this German comment, though prescient, was not just a case of clairvoyance, for it rested upon
a knowledge of Marxism and of Soviet imperialism. "The
United States is perfectly informed about the conditions of terror
imposed by the Soviet in the territory Russia recently occupied,"
the spokesman continued. "By supporting such efforts any third
party of course makes itself equally responsible for this assault
on civilization." [damn true D.C ]
The kettle was no less black because it was the pot that was calling it so. But in those days it was a tactic of the Roosevelt administration to scorn, as Nazi propaganda, anything said in Berlin, regardless of any amount of truth contained in it.
The police state which was spawned by Bolshevism as an ugly sequel to the Revolution of 1917 and which has ever since drawn its vitality from a weird fusion of idealistic pretensions and brutal terrorism could logically commemorate the thirty first day of July, 1941, as one of the most auspicious dates in its history. The·assurances given on that day to the Red Army by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States, and by Harry Hopkins, the creature and mouthpiece of Roosevelt, to Stalin in the Kremlin virtually guaranteed that the Soviet Union would be built up to be a monstrous military power that would cast a lengthening shadow over Europe and Asia throughout the following decades.[And this was done why? D.C]
Naturally, the average American citizen knew little of the import of what was occurring. He was being agreeably diverted (although unemployment recorded in August, 1941, was 5,620,000, or·one-tenth of the total labor force). His resistance to the idea of going to war, for ends which were dubious at best, was slowly being chipped away. Mr. Roosevelt saw to that personally.
For example, on that eventful day when the President was receiving the Russian generals at the White House, the American people-or at least those who were reading their newspapers -were being regaled with accounts of a visit by one Alvin York to the White House the day before. Alvin York was the heroic Sergeant York of World War I. The Hollywood interventionist set,5 close political allies of the President, had reached back a whole generation to resurrect the almost-forgotten Mr. York. They had made a motion picture with the title Sergeant York. It was a clever piece of jingoism which was calculated to make many an adventurous youngster yearn to get a gun in his hands and be a hero, too. President Roosevelt then arranged to have Mr. York brought to the White House, where, with much publicity, he praised the new picture and told Mr. York that he thought it would do much "to rouse our people." This gratuitous Presidential plug for a motion picture was in the newspapers at a timely moment.
Later in the day, after Generals Golikoff and Respin and the
Soviet Ambassador had left the White House, another foreign
visitor arrived for an appointment with the President. It was the
British Ambassador, Lord Halifax. Naturally, one of the prime
duties of this suave diplomat was to keep a sharp watch on
President Roosevelt's humors, with the object of accelerating,
however possible, the tempo of American participation in the
war. Mr. Roosevelt, in turn, had opened his arms to Lord Halifax
and was a willing collaborator in the job of putting an innocent
face on the British cause in the world power struggle then
raging. This, of necessity, involved a liberal touching up of the
record of history and so came within one of Mr. Roosevelt's special
aptitudes. He .liked to refer to Lord Halifax's homeland as
a "peace-loving nation," in spite of the fact that since the foundation
of British nationalism in the eleventh century the doughty
Englishmen had never let a single generation pass without engaging in warfare somewhere away from their own soil.
On this occasion, Lord Halifax did not come to the White House empty handed. He brought as gifts to Mr. Roosevelt a portrait of the President by Frank Salisbury, a gold medal from the Royal Society of Arts, awarded by its president, the Duke of Connaught, and a diploma from Oxford University attesting that Mr. Roosevelt had received its honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law.
The British Ambassador remained with the President one hour. They probably talked about Mr. Roosevelt's impending meeting with Prime Minister Churchill, which was to result in the Atlantic Charter. But that was a guarded secret. They also talked about Japan. What they said to each other on this subject was, of course, not made public. Upon leaving the White House, Lord Halifax was not explicit, but said that it was a fair assumption that the conference had touched on' Far Eastern developments. Asked if future moves had been planned, he replied, "Not a great deal. We discussed various possibilities."
"Possibilities" for what? For fostering amicable relations with the Japanese government, then headed by the moderate Prince Konoye, or for prodding the Japanese to some desperate act of aggression that would touch off war with England and the United States? For playing into the hands of the war party in Japan by new belligerent moves which would force the Konoye cabinet out of power and bring in General Tojo and his militarists? For cutting the ground from under the conscientious Joseph C. Grew, our Ambassador in Tokyo, who thought, or hoped, that his government really wanted peace ? For stultifying in the eyes of the Japanese people those moderate leaders who were known to desire a resolution of the China impasse and an escape from the tripartite agreement with the Axis powers? For forcing the Japanese to go south from their tiny islands to more favored lands in order to get oil, tin, rubber, and rice at gunpoint, as had the English, the Dutch, and the French before them?
The insinuation is not fanciful. In the first place, President Roosevelt wanted war.6 And certainly the British, who were already in one in Europe, wished for nothing more than that America be in it with them. The Far East was the back door. If the United.States were to clash with Japan, she would also be plunged into the maelstrom in Europe. This was perfectly foreseeable (and, of course, is exact!y what happened).
In the second place, secret and detailed war plans were ready. British and American military and naval experts, disguised in civilian clothes to conceal from the public the fact that the United States was surreptitiously entering into a military alliance, had drawn them up a few months earlier in Washington and Singapore. (This all came out five years later in the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack.)7
Third, President Roosevelt had just initiated a series of highly provocative actions which were almost certain to lead to war with Japan. 'The Panama Canal had been closed to Japan's ships, and her oil had been cut off.8
The President was not one to eschew an indirect means to an end when the direct one was denied him. During the early summer of 1941, his Secretary of War, Stimson, conscious of the fact that in a democracy the people have a right to candor on the part of their public officials, was urging Mr. Roosevelt to come out boldly for intervention in the war in Europe; but now, in July, he came to realize that political considerations based upon what was "palatable" to the people had so firmly committed the President "to his own more gradual course that nothing could change him."9 It is obvious that Henry L. Stimson, who had never been elected to a public office, was temperamentally incapable of comprehending the modus operandi of a virtuoso politician such as Franklin D. Roosevelt. The squire of Hyde Park had not won his third term campaign by being candid, nor was he going to reach his fourth term by the route of candor.
In Roosevelt's machinations to embroil the United States in the European war, Hitler had turned out to be somewhat disappointing. The Lend-Lease Act, which the President rammed through Congress in March, had violated every concept and canon of neutrality enunciated in international law since the time of Grotius, including the Hague Conventions. And on April 21, Roosevelt had directed units of the Atlantic fleet to "trail" German and Italian merchant and naval ships and aircraft and to broadcast their movements in plain language at four-hour intervals for the convenience of British warships and planes.10 These were but two of a list of steps which he had taken to make the United States,for all intents and purposes, a belligerent, though a non-official one. He was waging an undeclared war. (Admiral Stark wrote in a private letter a month before Pearl Harbor: "Whether the country knows it or not, we are. at war.") 11 In short, Mr. Roosevelt had put a chip on his shoulder and had dared the Nazi dictator to knock it oft. The latter had not obliged. Although American warships were plowing the Atlantic and helping the British navy and although American military aid was of such a nature and the attitude of the Roosevelt administration so pugnacious that Prime Minister Churchill was able to tell the House of Commons on July 21 that the United States was "on the verge of war," the Germans were careful not to accommodate Mr. Roosevelt by giving him sufficient grounds to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
When American troops were sent to Iceland to relieve fifteen thousand British soldiers garrisoned there, hopes that Hitler might consider this the last straw rose high in administration circles. On July 7, when Roosevelt, after being badgered by Senator Burton K. Wheeler into making the revelation, finally notified Congress of this movement of forces, he made it appear to be purely a matter of defense of the Western Hemisphere because, as Stimson confides to us, he believed that "this was a more palatable argument to the people."12 However, Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, wrote a letter to Captain (later Admiral) Charles M. Cooke, Jr., on July 31 in which he said, in the more blunt fashion of the Navy, "The Iceland situation may produce an incident.... Whether or not we will get an 'incident' ... I do not know. Only Hitler can answer."13
As it turned out, Hitler continued a cautious path. He did not give President Roosevelt the incident he was waiting for. His U-boats were instructed to keep away from American ships where possible.14 "They're keeping out of our way, apparently," said Secretary of the Navy Knox on August 16. To be sure, the American destroyer Greer was sunk on September 4 by torpedoes, but under circumstances which were far from clear on the point of whether the Greer or the German submarine had been the aggressor.15 This was clearly not the case for the President to take to Congress without fear of a rebuff. In fact, the Navy Department refused to submit the log of the Greer to inspection by the United States Senate.16
In the meantime, Mr. Roosevelt was not putting all his bets on one horse. If the 'Germans would not attack the United States, perhaps the Japanese would. The troubled waters of the Far East were full of "possibilities," to pluck a word from Lord Halifax's cryptic comment when he emerged from his private conversation with President Roosevelt in the White House on July 31. Had Mr. Roosevelt told Lord Halifax that the Navy Department had advised him in advance that the oil embargo would force Japan to make war to get oil? If they talked at all about the Far Eastern situation-and Lord Halifax said they did-this must have been mentioned,·for it was the most potent fact in that situation and it is inconceivable that the loquacious Mr. Roosevelt would have been so lacking in frankness to his visitor on a matter of their common interest that he would smother the information. In those days, it was not uncommon for intelligence which was carefully kept secret from the American people,chiefly for political reasons, to be imparted freely to the British hierarchy.
Admiral Richmond K. Turner, chief of the War Plans Division of the Navy Department, had, with the general concurrence of Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, prepared for the State Department and the President an analysis of the effects of such an embargo. This report, made on July 22, set forth the Navy's official position on the advisability of imposing the embargo. It stated that an embargo "would probably result in a fairly early attack by Japan on Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies," that it would have "an immediate severe psychological reaction in Japan against the United States," that it seemed certain that if Japan should take measures against the British and Dutch, she would also include military action against the Philippines, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war. The final recommendation was "that trade with Japan not be embargoed at this time."17
Of course to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had other objectives in mind than the maintenance of peace, this conclusion was a non sequitur. Three days later, on July 25, from Hyde Park, he issued an executive order freezing all Japanese assets in the United States and imposing a virtual embargo on trade between the two countries.18 Naturally, the British and the Dutch government-in-exile in England followed suit. Japan, which because of her natural deficiencies must trade or perish, was backed to the wall. Whether or not the Navy's analysis decided the issue for Mr. Roosevelt must remain a matter of conjecture, but we do know that when the Navy advised that the embargo would precipitate war, he promptly imposed it.
This move was palmed off on the public as an effort to deter Japan from a course of aggression. The official Navy conclusion that it would have just the opposite effect was, of course, kept secret. Five years later, the truth came out at the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack when Admiral Stark, who at the time the Japanese embargo was imposed was the top Navy man in Washington, frankly admitted that all high officials in Washington had known it meant ultimate war. Roosevelt had pulled the wool over the eyes of the American public but not over those of Admiral Stark. Stark did not even blame the Japanese. When Roosevelt cut off Japan's oil, Stark felt that "if he were a Jap," he would go and take oil where he could find it. At the Congressional hearings in 1946, Senator Ferguson put the question to him: "About the oil question, and your attitude toward Japan: Did you not testify before the Navy Court that after the imposition of economic sanctions upon Japan in the summer of 1941, you stated that Japan would go somewhere and take it [oil], and that if you were a Jap you would?"
"I think that is correct," Admiral Stark responded. "I stated it, and I stated in the State Department, as I recall, that if a complete shutdown was made on the Japanese, throttling her commercial life and her internal life, and her essential normal peace life by stopping her from getting oil, the natural thing for a Jap was to say, 'Well, I will go down and take it.'"19
President Roosevelt and Lord Halifax knew what was natural for "a Jap" to do as well as Admiral Stark did. So on that busy July 31, when the shrewd, gangling Ambassador of His Majesty's Government, armed with a portrait of Mr. Roosevelt and other touching gifts, bore down upon the President in the White House, "the various possibilities" they discussed were, it is reasonable to assume, of a distinctly bellicose nature. The term was a British understatement. "Probabilities" would have been more accurate, but it would have stirred up more embarrassing questions.
Lest the pressure on Japan be not quite strong enough, more was now applied. Mr. Roosevelt's verve was undoubtedly intensified by the realization that if Japan were kept well occupied elsewhere, she would not be a threat to the Russian flank in Siberia; and the sanctity of the Soviet Union never failed to arouse sympathy in the heart of this man, who was later to participate in carving up at least six sovereign nations with icy aplomb. His visitors, the Russian generals and the British Ambassador, had hardly departed when he tossed back his leonine head and roared again in the direction of Japan. He signed an executive order setting up a governmental office of economic warfare, known euphemistically as the Economic Defense Board, and put Henry A. Wallace in charge of it. It was simultaneously reported that administration officials had prepared "an additional blacklist" of some four hundred firms and persons doing business in Latin America and that this consisted, in large part, of Japanese concerns.20
On the following day, President Roosevelt ordered a further tightening of the gasoline and oil embargo. Comments were heard from men in the petroleum trade to the effect that the ban would seriously affect Japan.21 This, of course, tended to confirm the secret advice the President had received from the Navy that it would force Japan to seek oil by open warfare, but Mr. Roosevelt, posing as a zealous worker in the cause of preventing aggression, could count on a fair degree of public complacency and feel secure politically in the knowledge that the public was ignorant of the fact that he had flouted the recommendation of the Navy. His mood of belligerence unabated, he also had his Office of Production Management stop all processing of raw silk for civilian use. This meant the cessation of manufacture of silk hosiery, neckties, dress goods, etc.22 Since for many years the United States had been the greatest raw silk-consuming country in the world and Japan the greatest raw silk-exporting nation in the world, this was a cutting blow. In the art of incitement of international conflict, Mr. Roosevelt was as resourceful as he was adept at screening the shadow of impending consequences from public sight.
The Japanese had moved troops into southern Indochina and had established bases there by agreement with the Vichy government of France. Indochina was a French possession toward which the Russian colossus to the north had long been casting an envious eye, just as it had toward China proper. A serious Communist..inspired revolt had occurred at Yen Bay in 1930, and Soviet propaganda and agitation had continued among the Annamite peoples throughout the decade. There are those who would scoff at any analogy between the movement of American troops into Denmark's Iceland and the entry of Japanese troops into France's Indochina two weeks later. That the Japanese, Asiatics by geography and by blood, should have exhibited a positive concern for the future status of southeastern Asia is hardly astonishing. (Nor should it later have surprised anyone cognizant of the basic problems of the Far East that chaos and war raged in Indochina for many bloody years after Japan was eliminated from the scene and that American planes and guns were eventually needed there to hold at bay an enemy far more sinister than the Japanese.)
Franklin D. Roosevelt was adamant on the point of erasing all Japanese influence on the rich continent of Asia. While the British sat smugly in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Burma, while a decadent French colonialism clung, with weakening fingers, to the rice fields and rubber plantations of Indochina, and while the Kremlin was entertaining and educating Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese henchmen who were being trained to implement the Soviet blueprint for the ultimate Communization of all China and Korea and the lush lands to the south, Japan was treated to a diet of sanctimonious preachment's by the American President and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. One would have supposed from their lectures that if it were not for Japan's dream of her "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," the war lords, the bandits, and the Communist, Soviet-supported revolutionists would sheath their bloody swords and peace and amity would reign from Singapore and Batavia to Harbin. One would also have imagined that aggression and exploitation in the Far East began and would end with the Japanese.
Baffled by what they called the "lack of reality" of the Roosevelt-Hull approach, the attitude of the Japanese oscillated between propitiation and truculence, between polite amiability and explosive anger. They did have visions of empire. From their small, overpopulated islands, these energetic people saw across the Yellow and South China seas and the Sea of Japan the natural resources which they needed, not merely to achieve what they conceived to be a worthy destiny, but also to feed themselves.
But there were good reasons to hope that they could be deflected from a path of wanton aggression. These hopes brightened just one week before President Roosevelt, against the Navy's advice, cut off Japanese trade. This sequence is at least curious. On July 18, a shake-up in the Japanese cabinet had eliminated Foreign Minister Matsuoka, the proponent of close collaboration with Germany. In his place was Admiral Teijiro Toyoda, who was known to be a moderate.23 The new vice-premier was Baron Hiranuma, who had been heading a drive to suppress clandestine German activity in Japan.24 No pleasure was shown by President Roosevelt at these changes. He became all the more intransigent.
The American Ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, subsequently made impassioned efforts to arrange a meeting, in Hawaii or in Alaska, between the Japanese Premier, Prince Konoye, and President Roosevelt. Prince Konoye urgently desired the meeting. Mr. Grew, who had been at his post nine years and who understood Japanese politics and psychology intimately,believed it was the road to a rapprochement. His efforts, of course, were futile. President Roosevelt brushed them off with a bullheadedness which was possible only because the American public was not aware of the incident.
Across the Pacific Ocean came a fervent entreaty from Ambassador Grew. It was a cry of frustration from an honest public servant. He firmly believed that "a complete readjustment of relations between Japan and the United States" could be brought about if the United States would "use the present opportunity." The American people never heard this prayer because it was communicated, as diplomatic usage prescribed, in a long but secret cable addressed to Secretary of State Hull. It cautioned that further stalling by the President would convince the Japanese "that the United States Government is only playing for time" and would lead to the downfall of the Konoye cabinet, which, Ambassador Grew was convinced, was prepared to make great concessions for a peaceful solution.25
The point was not lost on the wily man in the White House, but the effect was quite the reverse of Ambassador Grew's intentions. When Mr. Roosevelt was thus authoritatively apprised of the consequences of further stalling on his part, he proceeded to stall the more and with the greater arrogance. He would not meet with the Japanese Premier to discuss anything unless the latter would surrender to all of Mr. Roosevelt's terms in advance of the meeting. This condition was, as Mr. Roosevelt knew and as Ambassador Grew had told him, an impossible one for the chief of any Oriental state to accept, particularly one faced with a delicate internal political schism.
As Cordell Hull puts it, Roosevelt refused to meet with the Japanese Premier "without first arriving at a satisfactory agreement."26 But such an agreement was impossible without the meeting. (After such an agreement, the meetings would be unnecessary.) Grew took pains to point out this dilemma (as though Roosevelt, who devised it, were not conscious of it). The absurdity was compounded by Secretary Hull's communications to the Japanese, which were such masterpieces of negativism that their recipients could not possibly know what, specifically, they were expected to agree to.27 The general intention, however, was clear: Japan was to be relegated permanently to the status of a third-rate power, dependent for the sustenance of her eighty million people upon the willingness of vested empires to trade with her and exposed, through a China chaotic from civil strife and Communist penetration, to the well-known and dreaded ambitions of the Soviet Union. Against anything short of this, the President was adamant. (As will be seen, he later [at Yalta] secretly connived to bring the Soviet army into the North China power vacuum which the collapse of Japan would create.)
Even so, Prince Konoye virtually begged to see President Roosevelt and make a try for peace. When he was brushed off repeatedly, the result was what Ambassador Grew had prophesied. The Konoye cabinet fell, and the only hope of peace was extinguished. The military dictatorship of General Hideki Tojo took the reins of power in Japan. The American people knew that Konoye had fallen. They did not know who had pushed him.
When Cordell Hull wrote his memoirs, he did not even mention that long, anguished cable from Ambassador Grew, although in its historical implications it is one of the most important documents of the time. This was not an oversight, for he devoted an entire chapter to what he labeled the "Roosevelt-Konoye Meeting," which never took place. By a slight concession to historic completeness, Hull grudgingly mentioned that Grew "recommended" the meeting, then hastened to say that Grew "could not estimate the over-all world situation as we could in Washington."28 But Joseph C. Grew was a career statesman of much broader experience in international affairs than this elderly, provincial former Senator from Tennessee, to whom Roosevelt had given an office and a title but no real authority and whom Harry Hopkins always virtually ignored. The only crucial thing Ambassador Grew did not know was that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his aides wanted war, not peace. If Hull had set forth the Grew cable in his memoirs, its contents would have demolished the structure of words which he was building to exculpate himself.
Most apologists for the Rooseveltian diplomacy of the period conveniently also omit all reference to it. It is too embarrassing. It evokes a vision of the what-might-have-been, if there had been a different President in the White House. An exception is that indefatigable Roosevelt infatuate, Professor Basil Rauch of Columbia University. In his Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor,29 he makes bold to meet this troublesome point head on. Remembering that Professor Rauch's major prior historical effort was an almost ecstatic History of the New Deal, one is not surprised that he rallies to the cause in this emergency. His solution has at least the virtue of simple directness. Ambassador Grew, says he, was wrong. The Roosevelt-Konoye meeting would have been futile because previous Japanese communications had not fully met the American terms.
If this logic is less than inexorable, it is at least faithful to the line which Secretary Hull set for loyal historians to follow when he wrote his memoirs. But the Grew plea, which Hull omitted, specifically and persuasively answers it; that was its very purpose. Grew was convinced that Konoye, at a personal meeting with the American President, could go much farther than. had been possible in formal communications. Professor Rauch, to parry the obvious retort that since war and peace hung in the balance, President Roosevelt should at least have tried to have a successful conference with the Japanese Premier, reaches into the blue and brings forth the startling excuse that Roosevelt would have been guilty of bad faith "had he then refused to sign an agreement with Konoye to implement United States cooperation with Japan in aggression."30 Not even Roosevelt had thought of this one, much less Cordell Hull. But Professor Rauch apparently finds it comforting. [Professor was such a useful idiot DC]
The latter author has been selected for mention here chiefly because he typifies a certain dwindling but still clamorous band of academicians and journalists. Having a penchant for facile categorization, which permitsthem to capture complex and even diverse ideas with a single word or slogan, they, in effect, divide all Americans of the 1938-45 years into two groups. In one group are all of those who believed that almost everything Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the conduct of foreign affairs was wise and honest; in the other are "isolationists." Naturally, these latter are dolts, intellectual pariahs, and they make up in malice what they lack in ignorance. There is no third group. There were thoughtful citizens in all walks of life who were skeptical of what President Roosevelt was up to and what it would lead to. Among them were men of broad backgrounds in international trade, diplomacy, and cultural intercourse, such as Herbert Hoover, Felix M. Morley, Hugh Gibson, and similar figures whose careers betokened the very antithesis of provincialism. No matter; they are all "isolationists."
It was, of course, Mr. Roosevelt who isolated himself when the Premier of Japan desperately sought a conference with him to try to work out a solution, other than war, to the Far Eastern imbroglio. It was he who had isolated Japan from oil, rubber, and a score of other materials vital to a modern·nation's existence. It was Roosevelt who, by a flourish of his pen, had isolated the silk industry of Japan from its American market. The word has infinite applications. Its noun compound, "isolationist," is a shotgun word that hits fifty wrong marks for each right one. Its use as an epithet verges on the puerile.
"Facts," said Huxley, "do not cease to exist because they are ignored." That Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted war, invited war, and provoked war is no longer seriously disputable. The biographical remembrance of Jesse Jones, who sat in President Roosevelt's cabinet during that historic period, to the effect that Roosevelt was a "total politician" who was "eager to get into the' fighting" to perpetuate himself in the Presidency 31 is surplus to the mass of carefully documented evidence which has already been brought to light and which points unequivocally to that conclusion. There remain, of course, the hero-worshipers, but today, only those who are blinded to the facts by partisanship or sheer idolatry can fail to admit that the Stanford University historian, Thomas A..Bailey, said a true, if shocking, thing when he wrote, in The Man in the Street, that "Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor."32
Returning our thoughts to that summer of 1941, we find that on .August 16, the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Admiral Nomura, called on Secretary of State Hull. A maddening negativism on the part of Mr. Hull pervaded this meeting, at which Nomura again pleaded for negotiations which would get beyond platitudes. But by this time Nornura was able to read between the lines. That same day, he cabled his estimate of the political situation to his government in Tokyo:
I understand that the British believe that if they could shortly have a Japanese-American war started at the back door, there would be a good prospect of getting the United States to participate in the European war. 33
This was not propaganda. Here was a Japanese diplomat reporting,
in code, to his superiors. Was Admiral Nomura just seeing
hobgoblins under the bed? Well, we know that when the war
finally did start at the back door with the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the Prime Minister of Great·Britain was delighted. In fact, Mr. Churchill confesses.in his memoirs that he was full of "the
greatest joy."34 Two months later, he gloated in the House of
Commons that the vast resources and power of the United States
were now in the war on the side of Britain all the way and to
the finish. Then, perhaps letting his ecstasy overwhelm his good
taste, he. paused to give his next words extra punch, and with a
roguish glint of triumph in his eyes and a tremor of emotion in
his voice, he confided to his enraptured audience:
This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, and worked for, and now it has come to' pass.35
It would seem that the hobgoblins Admiral Nomura saw under the bed had real flesh on their bones.
The cat slipped out of the British bag again three years later
when Captain Oliver Lyttelton, production minister in Churchill's
war cabinet, speaking on June 20, 1944, to the American
Chamber of Commerce in London, asserted that"America provoked
Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to
attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that
America was forced into war."36 Obsessed as he was with the
British point of view, Captain Lyttelton probably meant to pay
his American listeners a compliment. He later apologized when
he learned that he had blurted out a truth that was embarrassing
on the other side of the Atlantic.
As for Franklin D. Roosevelt, .the Pearl Harbor disaster on December 7, 1941, was a great fulfillment..His wife saw him shortly after he was informed of it. She tells us that he was more "serene" than he had been for a long time.37 At the cabinet meeting that evening, Frances Perkins found that. he had "a much calmer air." Naturally; he had accomplished his purpose. "His terrible moral problem had been resolved by the event," wrote Miss Perkins.38 She spared her benefactor by choosing the word "moral." It was his political problem that had been resolved by the event. He no longer had to pretend. (Perhaps that is what she meant by his "moral problem.") Neither of these ladies say he was surprised, although at the time he let the public draw the impression that he was. In fact, Mrs. Roosevelt later let her guard down so far as to write : "We had expected something of the sort for a long time."39 Actually, American intelligence had cracked the Japanese secret code 40 and many things were known, including almost the precise time when war would begin. Only the American people were surprised. They were led to believe that their lovable President, innocent as the dew, had been lolling about in his shirtsleeves, preparing to spend. a nice homey Sunday working on his stamp collection, when the terrible shock came to him.41
At one time the stamp collector had expected the Japanese attack to come a little sooner. At a meeting with Hull, Knox, Stimson, General Marshall, and Admiral Stark in the White House at noon on Tuesday, November 25, he had predicted secretly, of course-that the United States would be attacked, "perhaps as soon as next Monday December 1."42 Later information had indicated that the blow would not come until the weekend of the seventh. One might have supposed,if one knew what Mr. Roosevelt apparently knew on that Tuesday, November 25,that if he were going to send a direct appeal to Emperor Hirohito in a dramatic effort to stave off war, he would have sent it immediately on that day. But he did not. He waited until 9 P.M. on December 6, which would assure its arrival, Tokyo time, much too late to have any effect. The message reached the hands of the Emperor twenty minutes before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.43 It was sent only "for the record," as Hull later remarked.44
It would also be good "for the record" for Mr. Roosevelt to be found blithely working on his stamp collection on Sunday, December 7. The people would naturally assume that the President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces would have been occupied doing something more useful to the country.if he had known that war was imminent. So the show of idle composure bolstered the myth. Actually, to the President, the day was to be memorable not for any progress in philately on his part but as the happy ending to his devious machinations to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot.
This disaster was the coming event which cast its shadow when Lord Halifax walked up the steps of the White House on that last day of July, the same steps which the jubilant Generals Golikoft and Respin had descended a little earlier. The American people were only vaguely conscious that Japan was the back door to war. But President Roosevelt was not. Nor were the British. They were sure of it.
Lord Halifax had his duties, as had the gentle, eloquent Lord Lothian before him. The blueprint for British propaganda in the United States in this war had been prepared with thoroughness and cold deliberation. "In the next war, as in the last, the result will probably depend upon the way in which the United States acts, and her attitude will reflect the reaction of her public to propaganda properly applied." This bit of practical realism was in Sidney Rogerson's well-thumbed book, Propaganda and the Next War, which had been published in London in,1938 and which bore an Introduction by Captain Liddell Hart.45 Both of these writers were men of high repute in British diplomatic and military circles. "Propaganda properly applied." They were candid. "Applied" on-or to-whom? Obviously, the American people, whose susceptibility to English blandishments was not an unknown quantity, having been tested before.46 Sidney Rogerson had not belittled the task of getting the United States into the coming war, for too many Americans still remembered bitterly the last great crusade which had sent them to Europe "to make the world safe for democracy." But he had seen new avenues of approach. Thus: "The position will naturally be considerably eased if Japan were involved and this might and probably would bring America in without further ado." The choice of words is revealing. The involvement of Japan-meaning a clash with Japan-would not be a calamity to be avoided; on the contrary, it would "ease" the situation.
Those gossipy but occasionally perspicacious columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S.Allen had hinted, as far back as April 24, 1940, in their "Washington Merry-Go-Round," that if the United States entered World War II, it would be through "the back door of the Pacific." This was not taken seriously, for most people took it for granted that a President who professed so vehemently to "hate war" could at least manage to keep the country out of war with Japan.
The intentions of President Roosevelt, of course, were otherwise. By the time Lord Halifax visited him on July 31, the course of events was mapped out. Mr. Roosevelt knew as .well as Admiral Stark did "what a Jap would do." He was in the process of doing those things on his own part which would make "a Jap" do the things the Navy had told him "a Tap" would do under the circumstances, namely, go on a rampage and start a general war.
So the United States was to be at war, not only with Japan, but all over' the world. But for what? Americans were to be asked to give their lives on four continents and on all the oceans of the globe. To what end?
Every war must be holy. Its stated objectives must not be prosaic, especially·if its origins are at all questionable. They must be lofty, poetic, idealistic. A novice in mass psychology would know this, and surely a master such as Franklin D. Roosevelt did. He was one to put first things first, as he used to like to say. This was his next immediate job, when August came. The war had to be made holy.
This did not abash Franklin D. Roosevelt. The nerve of a brass monkey was exactly what he did have. He knew that we live in a propaganda age. In our time, public opinion is largely a response to propaganda stimuli exerted on a vast scale by the new techniques and instruments of the twentieth century. Nature had·bestowed upon him some rare gifts, including a magnetic personal·charm and a mellifluous voice, and he had assiduous!y cultivated the subtlest, if not necessarily the noblest, arts of politics. If any man could make red seem white, he was surely the one to do it. Thanks to the fortune of birth, he could give demagoguery a Groton accent.
In the second week of July, 1941, Wendell Willkie lunched
with President Roosevelt at the White House. Willkie was a
renegade Democrat who had, in 1940, ingratiated himself into
the Republican nomination for President and, after being defeated,
had leaped onto the Roosevelt bandwagon with the agility
of a sophomore doing a broad jump. He had not yet invented
his fatuous slogan, "One World," which was to help seduce the
Western peoples oft on a calamitous false premise, but he had
cozied up to the President and put himself in position for some
spectacular globe-trotting and world-wide publicity. He came
out of the White House all smiles.
Two days before, the President had revealed to Congress that American naval forces had occupied Iceland. The ebullient Willkie now told reporters that he even favored American bases in Ireland and Scotland. A newspaperman reminded him that pollsters had found the people of the United States overwhelmingly opposed to war. Willkie smiled and said that "leadership" would win out in the end.1
He had just lunched tete-a.-tete with the man who was going to do the leading. He did not reveal what was said over the lamb chops. But one story about this long conference reached the press as Willkie was leaving. According to Willkie, Roosevelt told him that friends had advised him to retain the foremost psychiatrists in the United States "to work out ways of correcting and influencing public opinion." Willkie grinned. "Mr. President," said he, "have you heard of the first meeting of your fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Albert Lasker, the advertising man?" The President had not. Willkie told how Lasker traveled to Oyster Bay, how Teddy, all smiles, teeth, and outstretched arms, burst in to greet him, crying out, "Mr. Lasker, I've been told that you have the master advertising mind in the country." Said Lasker hastily, "It would be presumptuous for anyone to claim that in your presence." "And so," said Willkie to his.luncheon host, "I think it would be presumptuous for any psychiatrist to tell you how to influence public opinion." Willkie could call it "leadership." (Rather maladroitly, he smiled as he said it.) It had different names in different parts of the world. Whatever it was, it was to be laid on thick, with a heavy trowel.
The objectives of the international Communist movement, under the aegis of Soviet Russia, were as obvious as the sun at noon. As early as 1936, the American Ambassador in Moscow had cabled to Washington: "We should not cherish for a moment the illusion that it is possible to establish really friendly relations with the Soviet Government, or with any Communist party or Communist individual."2 This cable was not made public by the State Department until May, 1952, sixteen years later.. However, the caveat should have been redundant to anyone who had ever troubled to read Karl Marx's manifesto. The virus was endemic in Communism; its fetid breath was its own ill omen to the world. There was no room for illusion. So it is that the American apologists and court historians of the 1950'S, bent on whitewashing the Roosevelt record, were in so many cases either the fools or the faithless of the 1930'S and 1940's.
As General Douglas MacArthur has reminded us, "Long before even the second World War, the Soviet was known to plan suppression of the concept of freedom and the advance of Communism throughout the world, as rapidly as conditions would permit."3 In the summer of 1941, the United States, egged on by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was about to mold those conditions to the Soviet plan. An historic apostasy in the camp of Western Christendom, even more startling than Hitler's pact with Stalin in 1939, was about to take place. Bolshevism, now stricken, was to be put under an American oxygen tent and saved; then it was to be launched on conquest and its enemies disarmed. The next generation was to wrestle with the consequences.
Lord Lloyd, in his The British Case 4 which was published in 1940 under an American imprint with a Foreword and official blessing by none other than Lord Halifax, had said the German-Soviet pact was "Hitler's final apostasy. It was the betrayal of Europe." He also had said that "Russian agents and Russian money were busy all over Europe." Sir Victor Sassoon, the British banker and a man of wide knowledge of the world, had confided to newspapermen upon arriving in New York that "Russia would be found to be the real enemy of Great Britain before long" and that the elimination of Hitler would leave that problem unsolved.5
Now in the summer of 1941, Hitler had bowed out and Franklin D. Roosevelt was bowing in as the collaborator with Stalin. However, the people were not to·see the historical import of what was taking place. President Roosevelt would divert their attention by talking only about Hitler and Mussolini and their sins, and Tojo would be cast as the only bad man of Asia. "Practical politics," Henry Adams had said, "consists in ignoring facts."
Even before there was the added embarrassment of a Communistic ally, the war faction in the United States found that it had a difficult product to sell. The people were not sure what the war was all about. Hitler and his Nazis were generally despised for their chauvinistic antics, their arrogance and cruelty, but cool heads could admit the possibility that the international mayhem committed at Versailles had left Germany with some just grievances. The British themselves were not amateurs at the power game. Did an empire which sprawled over six continents have a right, and particularly a moral right, to denounce aggressian? The British and the French, for all their obeisances to international morality, were perhaps just as cutthroat as the Germans. The only difference was one of timing; wars and pillage had satisfied their ambitions earlier. Both of them had grabbed more territories in the first World War and were exploiting them with a finesse developed in three centuries of imperialism. What had America to gain by getting into the power struggle?
Americans were in a mood to take wars with a grain of salt. In April, 1937, exactly twenty years after the United States had plunged into a war "to make the world safe for democracy," 71 per cent of those polled by the Gallup Institute believed that America's entry into World War I had been a mistake. Were they going to dash forth again in the trappings of angels and run the risk of having their children laugh at them as dupes some twenty years later? The mirages of one generation are dispersed by the revisionism of the next. Perhaps this war would spawn more problems than it would solve. Perhaps, ironically, it would beget still another war to undo the consequences of this one.
Such sentiments were not pro-Hitler. They were heard from the most divergent sources, from the National Association of Manufacturers to Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate, and such respected publicists and scholars as Harry Elmer Barnes, Stuart Chase, Quincy Howe, Oswald Garrison Villard, Sidney Hertzberg, and C. Hartley Grattan, who were as anti-Fascist as they were anti-Communist. Former braintruster and columnist Hugh Johnson said bluntly what many were thinking: "I despise Hitler and I like England but in any international war situation I wouldn't trust our fate to either of them as far as I could throw a bull by the tail."6
Men such as these naturally shunned any sympathy with the self-styled Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, which avowed its·devotion to Hitler. The Bund members were poison to their own cause. Their inept, loutish organization was repulsive to almost all Americans of German descent, who disowned it. It did der Fuhrer more harm than good. More effective for the German cause was that high priest of American Antisemitism, the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin. His racist overtones were obnoxious to the great majority of people,·but his barbs at the Allies often touched a sensitive point. At times history seemed to be irrefutably on his·side, in spite of the obfuscation and imagery with which he embroidered his tirades on the radio and in his weekly magazine, Social Justice. Father Coughlin preached that the "advance of Red Communism into Christian Europe is even a worse threat to civilization than was the rise of Hitler." He was an early prophet-if an unwelcome one-when he wrote in Social Justice on October 23, 1939: "No one condones the persecutions of Hitler, nor his pact with Stalin, but when Hitlerism has been destroyed, Communism will possess Germany-Communism at the very doors of Paris and London." The passing of Hitler, he said, would not bring tranquility to Europe, and he warned his listeners·against being deluded by the politicians into believing that it would. Naturally, the Rooseveltians hated him, and the feeling was mutual.
The United States was a maelstrom of conflicting propaganda's. 7 Protagonists of the German cause were, however, doomed to a chilly response in the long run. The Roosevelt administration put every possible legal obstacle in their path and threw the full weight of its own propaganda facilities against them. Moreover, Adolf Hitler was too unpalatable a morsel to appeal to the American taste. As for Mussolini, only too easily could he be caricatured as a.comic-opera buffoon, and the basic dilemma of overpopulated Italy slurred over. If the public was confused about the real causes of Europe's malaise, which erupted in such violent symptoms, it was also somewhat apathetic about determining them.
As for the British and the French, they sent a virtual expeditionary force to the United States, the promised land. This mobile corps invaded the drawing rooms, the lecture halls, the women's clubs, the colleges, the industrial plants, the fashion shows, even the bars. (Lucius Beebe complained in the New York Herald Tribune that he could no longer "jerk a quick one" without hearing some "British Sir Somebody Something" declaiming on "what you Americans should understand.") One battalion of the invaders was erudite, another was glamorous. In Hollywood, the Anglo-French forces scored some of their most effective advances, with such shock troops as Ronald Colman, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, and Basil Rathbone in the front line. Filmland hummed with pro-Allied activity. Charles Boyer was thought to be away in the French army when, early in the war, he suddenly arrived back in New York on his greater mission. Eve Curie was also sent over. She made charming talks about springtime in Paris, delicately interspersed with world politics. Leon Blumts brother, Rene, was on hand with a dossier on Americana and a Gallic ingenuity in probing for soft spots in the armor of American neutrality. With Alfred Duff Cooper came his wife, Lady Diana Manners, who had played the Virgin in The Miracle and who informed reporters that her trip to America was "my war work."8
This phalanx had only a limited success. Too many Americans were still unimpressed with the holiness of the Allied cause. One could not just slough off all the facts. After all, the population of Danzig was 99 per cent German;9 the checkered area of central and southern Europe was "an economic nightmare," as Hitler called it; the French, English, Dutch and Belgians did have rich colonies, while Germany had none; the rise of Hitler and Mussolini was in a sense, a reaction to chaos and despair and Marxist violence in Germany and Italy. These and a score of other incontrovertibly kept popping up in spite of the barrage of invective. They made the issues seem much less simple than they were described in the winsome pleadings of a Lady Diana Manners or in the ingratiating rhetoric of the British Ambassador. The majority of the American people had, it is true, a preference for an Allied victory, but the majority also wanted the United States to stay out of the war. Every poll confirmed that.
When the German Wehrmacht wheeled into Russia late in June of 1941 and it became clear that the defeat of Hitler would be but one face of a two-sided coin, the victory of Stalin being on the other side, the holiness of the war was even less apparent. However, the radical labor movement, whipped up by the Communists in their ranks,.made a sudden flip-flop and abandoned their anti-war stand overnight. With the mother of Bolshevism at bay, the war became, for them, a crusade. From top to bottom, the Roosevelt administration became feverish with the desire to help Russia. In other circles, there was more skepticism than ever.
Herbert Hoover, sensing what President Roosevelt and Harry
Hopkins were up to and foreseeing what the consequences would
be, warned against "a gargantuan jest" at the expense of America.
"Joining in a war alongside Stalin to impose freedom is a
travesty," he said.10 Hiram Johnson thundered in the Senate:
"I will not subscribe to the doctrine that you must be a Stalinite
to be an American.... Good God! Did we ever sink so low before
as to choose one cutthroat out of two? This man was Hitler's
ally.... Now we furnish him with weapons which may be
turned upon US."11 Charles A. Lindbergh's voice, resonating
from the deep wells of courage and sincerity of this grave, studious
man, foretold what lay at the end of the Roosevelt path: a
Europe half enslaved and barbarized, an Asia corroded by
hatred, an America bled and drained of its resources for at least
a decade, perhaps two.
Well, what did lie ahead, at the end of President Roosevelt's path? What would Europe and the world look like? What potion was he really brewing in his bubbling cauldron? Mr. Roosevelt had not said. By the end of July, 1941, it was high time that he did say. He knew that. The country had one foot in the morass of war already, chiefly as a result of his policies. Skepticism was rife. Even England, which had declared war on Germany in September, 1939, ostensibly because the territory of Poland had been violated, had not stated its war aims with any clarity. Now that the Soviet Union, which had recently had a field day ravaging half of Poland as an accomplice of Hitler, was being welcomed into the Allied camp, no one knew what would happen to Poland after an Allied victory, much less to the rest of eastern Europe or Germany.
A powerful blast at the Roosevelt policy of getting this country involved in such a war had just been prepared for public release over the signatures of the following: Felix M. Morley, a former League of Nations functionary and a recent editor of the Washington Post) then president of Haverford College; Frank o. Lowden, patriarchal former governor of Illinois; Herbert Hoover; Robert M. Hutchins, precocious president of the University of Chicago; Joshua R. Clark, former Ambassador to Mexico and a powerful Mormon; Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University and former Secretary of the Interior; AI£ M. Landon; Hanford MacNider, former Minister to Canada; Henry P. Fletcher, former Ambassador to Italy; former Vice-- President and World War I General Charles G. Dawes; the Pennsylvania Quaker figure, Joseph H. Scattergood; old-time opera star Geraldine Farrar; and writers Irvin S. Cobb and Clarence Buddington Kelland. The statement said: "The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop.to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war.... Exceeding its expressed purpose, the Lend-Lease bill has been followed by naval action, by military occupation of bases outside the Western Hemisphere, by promise of unauthorized aid to Russia and by other belligerent moves.... We have gone as far as is consistent either with law, with sentiment or with security.... It [the war] is not purely a world conflict between tyranny and freedom. The Anglo-Russian alliance has dissipated that illusion.... Insofar as this is a war of power politics, the American people want no part in it. . .. Few people honestly believe that the Axis is now, or will in the future, be in a position to threaten the independence of any part of this Hemisphere if our defenses are properly prepared. Freedom in America does not depend on the outcome of struggles for material power between other nations."12
It was not enough to sneer at such a protestation or to brush it off as politically inspired. Was not President Roosevelt himself at least as politically minded as any of these distinguished individuals could be charged with being ? Was their patriotism any more impeachable than his? More was needed by way of answer. Mr. Roosevelt was astute enough to perceive that.
In reality, the gloomy prognostications of Hoover, Lindbergh, and the other critics of Roosevelt's war obsession were, both at the time they were uttered and later as reviewed retrospectively, unanswerable logically. They merely expressed what any objective analyst of the international facts of life would have had to concede. But could propaganda so becloud the obvious that the masses of the people would actually believe that Soviet Russia would be fighting shoulder to shoulder with America·for freedom everywhere (or even anywhere) ?
Franklin D. Roosevelt quite evidently thought this possible. It required a tour de force in the manipulation of mass psychology, which daunted him not at all. People "are governed more by feeling and sentiment than by reasoned consideration," Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf. It is difficult not to perceive that Franklin D. Roosevelt also believed this and acted upon it. The habitual political techniques of both of these men were based on the premise that man is basically irrational. Each of them was a sensational political phenomenon in his own country, Hitler with his revival of the Fuhrer legend and Roosevelt with his four terms. Each drew upon war, preparation for war, and the propaganda of war for motive power to propel himself onward and upward in his spectacular political career.
Rarely does a nation go to war without illusions. The people of the United States had not yet been given their set of illusions. This preliminary could be postponed no longer. Some beautiful war aims, innocent as the magician's fluffy white rabbit, had to be pulled out of the Presidential hat.
next
FISH AND CHURCHILL
notes
CHAPTER VI
1. Ray Brock in the Baltimore Sun, July 22, 1941, from Ankara (Copyright 1941 by the New York Times); Preston Groves, Associated Press correspondent in Istanbul, Baltimore Sun, July 28, 1941.
2. Sherwood, op. cit., 342.
3. William C. Bullitt, The Great Globe Itself (Scribner's, 1946), II.
4. Sherwood, op. cit., 327-44.
5. The Jewish community, powerful in the motion-picture industry, was understandably incensed by Hitler's anti-Semitism.
6. See Note 4 of Chapter IV, supra.
7. Careful documentation of the pre-Pearl Harbor story, with specific references to the transcript of the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (hereafter referred to as Joint Congressional Committee), as well as other documentary evidence, is to be found in the sources cited in Note 4 of Chapter IV.
8. Foreign Relations, Japan 1931-1941 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), II, 266, 267.
9. Stimson and Bundy, Ope cit., 373.
10. Pearl Harbor Attack (Hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee), Part 5, 229y1ff.
11. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 5, 2121.
12. Stimson and Bundy, Ope cit., 373.
13. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 16, 2175.
14. The testimony of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz at the Niirn.. berg Trials in 1946 concerning orders to the German navy sheds light on Hitler's anxiety to avoid conflict with the United States. New York Times, May 9, 1946.
15. See an account in Newsweek (November 10, 1941).
16. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 16, 2210.
17. Ibid., Part 5, 2382-84.
18. See Note 8, supra.
19. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 5, 2379-80.
20. New York Times, August I, 1941.
21. Ibid., August 2, 1941.
22. Ibid., August 2, 194I.
23. Newsweek (July 28, 1941). See also Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 14, 1343, and Part 15, 1849.
24. Newsweek (July 21, 1941).
25. Foreign Relations, Japan 1931-1941, II, 645-50'
26. Hull, Ope cit., 1025.
27. For a well-documented discussion of the circumstances pertain.. ing to the proposed Konoye-Roosevelt meeting, see Chapter XII of Sanborn, Ope cit. See also Tansill, Ope cit., and Grew, The Turbulent Era.
28. Hull, Ope cit., 1025.
29. Basil Rauch, Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor (Far.. rar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1954).
30. Ibid'l
31. Jesse Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars (Macmillan, 1951).
32. Bailey, Ope cit.
33. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 12, 17·
34. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 606.
35. Churchill's address of February 15,t942,' in the New York l~imes, February 16, 1942.
36. Associated Press dispatch from London, June 21, 1944.
37. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Ren~embcr (Harper, 1949), ~33.
38. Perkins, Ope cit., 379-80.
39. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 6, 2837.
40. The intercepted, decoded messages from Tokyo to the Japanese Ambassador in Washington are given in detail in Pearl Harbor At.. tack, Part 12, 1-316. The advance information Roosevelt and his inner circle had concerning the Japanese attack is documented in the Tan... sill, Sanborn, Morgenstern, Grew, and Kimmel books. (See Note 4 of Chapter IV, supra.)
41. Forrest Davis and Ernest K. Lindley, How War Came (Simon and 8chuster, .1942 ), 4.
42. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part II, 5433.
43. Ibid., Part 2, 570; see also Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan (Simon and Schuster, 1944), 493, 497·
44. John Chamberlain, "The Man Who Pushed Pearl Harbor," Life (April 1, 1946), 94.
45. Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda and the Next War (Geoffrey HIes [London], 1938).
46. For a study of British and German propaganda drives in WorId War II, see Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States (Yale University Press, 1940).
CHAPTER VII
1. Time (July 21, 1941).
2. U.S.-Soviet Relations, 1933-1939, a collection of hitherto unpuhlished documents released by the·State Department on May 24, 1952.
3. Radio address reported in the daily press, October 18, 1951.
4. Lord Lloyd, The British Case (Macmillan, 1940).
5. New York Herald Tribune, February 24, 1940.
6. New York World~Telegram,February 5, 1940.
7. A thorough and objective discussion of propaganda in the early period of the war is to be found in Lavine and Wechsler, Ope cit.
8. New York Herald Tribune, October 23, 1939.
9. Norman Pounds, An Historical and Political Geography of Europe (Harras [London] and Chanticleer [New York], 1947),3°3.
10. Vital Speeches, Vol. VII, 583.
11. Time (August 18, 1941).
12. Statement released to the public on August 5, 1941.
The kettle was no less black because it was the pot that was calling it so. But in those days it was a tactic of the Roosevelt administration to scorn, as Nazi propaganda, anything said in Berlin, regardless of any amount of truth contained in it.
The police state which was spawned by Bolshevism as an ugly sequel to the Revolution of 1917 and which has ever since drawn its vitality from a weird fusion of idealistic pretensions and brutal terrorism could logically commemorate the thirty first day of July, 1941, as one of the most auspicious dates in its history. The·assurances given on that day to the Red Army by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States, and by Harry Hopkins, the creature and mouthpiece of Roosevelt, to Stalin in the Kremlin virtually guaranteed that the Soviet Union would be built up to be a monstrous military power that would cast a lengthening shadow over Europe and Asia throughout the following decades.[And this was done why? D.C]
Naturally, the average American citizen knew little of the import of what was occurring. He was being agreeably diverted (although unemployment recorded in August, 1941, was 5,620,000, or·one-tenth of the total labor force). His resistance to the idea of going to war, for ends which were dubious at best, was slowly being chipped away. Mr. Roosevelt saw to that personally.
For example, on that eventful day when the President was receiving the Russian generals at the White House, the American people-or at least those who were reading their newspapers -were being regaled with accounts of a visit by one Alvin York to the White House the day before. Alvin York was the heroic Sergeant York of World War I. The Hollywood interventionist set,5 close political allies of the President, had reached back a whole generation to resurrect the almost-forgotten Mr. York. They had made a motion picture with the title Sergeant York. It was a clever piece of jingoism which was calculated to make many an adventurous youngster yearn to get a gun in his hands and be a hero, too. President Roosevelt then arranged to have Mr. York brought to the White House, where, with much publicity, he praised the new picture and told Mr. York that he thought it would do much "to rouse our people." This gratuitous Presidential plug for a motion picture was in the newspapers at a timely moment.
On this occasion, Lord Halifax did not come to the White House empty handed. He brought as gifts to Mr. Roosevelt a portrait of the President by Frank Salisbury, a gold medal from the Royal Society of Arts, awarded by its president, the Duke of Connaught, and a diploma from Oxford University attesting that Mr. Roosevelt had received its honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law.
The British Ambassador remained with the President one hour. They probably talked about Mr. Roosevelt's impending meeting with Prime Minister Churchill, which was to result in the Atlantic Charter. But that was a guarded secret. They also talked about Japan. What they said to each other on this subject was, of course, not made public. Upon leaving the White House, Lord Halifax was not explicit, but said that it was a fair assumption that the conference had touched on' Far Eastern developments. Asked if future moves had been planned, he replied, "Not a great deal. We discussed various possibilities."
"Possibilities" for what? For fostering amicable relations with the Japanese government, then headed by the moderate Prince Konoye, or for prodding the Japanese to some desperate act of aggression that would touch off war with England and the United States? For playing into the hands of the war party in Japan by new belligerent moves which would force the Konoye cabinet out of power and bring in General Tojo and his militarists? For cutting the ground from under the conscientious Joseph C. Grew, our Ambassador in Tokyo, who thought, or hoped, that his government really wanted peace ? For stultifying in the eyes of the Japanese people those moderate leaders who were known to desire a resolution of the China impasse and an escape from the tripartite agreement with the Axis powers? For forcing the Japanese to go south from their tiny islands to more favored lands in order to get oil, tin, rubber, and rice at gunpoint, as had the English, the Dutch, and the French before them?
The insinuation is not fanciful. In the first place, President Roosevelt wanted war.6 And certainly the British, who were already in one in Europe, wished for nothing more than that America be in it with them. The Far East was the back door. If the United.States were to clash with Japan, she would also be plunged into the maelstrom in Europe. This was perfectly foreseeable (and, of course, is exact!y what happened).
In the second place, secret and detailed war plans were ready. British and American military and naval experts, disguised in civilian clothes to conceal from the public the fact that the United States was surreptitiously entering into a military alliance, had drawn them up a few months earlier in Washington and Singapore. (This all came out five years later in the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack.)7
Third, President Roosevelt had just initiated a series of highly provocative actions which were almost certain to lead to war with Japan. 'The Panama Canal had been closed to Japan's ships, and her oil had been cut off.8
The President was not one to eschew an indirect means to an end when the direct one was denied him. During the early summer of 1941, his Secretary of War, Stimson, conscious of the fact that in a democracy the people have a right to candor on the part of their public officials, was urging Mr. Roosevelt to come out boldly for intervention in the war in Europe; but now, in July, he came to realize that political considerations based upon what was "palatable" to the people had so firmly committed the President "to his own more gradual course that nothing could change him."9 It is obvious that Henry L. Stimson, who had never been elected to a public office, was temperamentally incapable of comprehending the modus operandi of a virtuoso politician such as Franklin D. Roosevelt. The squire of Hyde Park had not won his third term campaign by being candid, nor was he going to reach his fourth term by the route of candor.
In Roosevelt's machinations to embroil the United States in the European war, Hitler had turned out to be somewhat disappointing. The Lend-Lease Act, which the President rammed through Congress in March, had violated every concept and canon of neutrality enunciated in international law since the time of Grotius, including the Hague Conventions. And on April 21, Roosevelt had directed units of the Atlantic fleet to "trail" German and Italian merchant and naval ships and aircraft and to broadcast their movements in plain language at four-hour intervals for the convenience of British warships and planes.10 These were but two of a list of steps which he had taken to make the United States,for all intents and purposes, a belligerent, though a non-official one. He was waging an undeclared war. (Admiral Stark wrote in a private letter a month before Pearl Harbor: "Whether the country knows it or not, we are. at war.") 11 In short, Mr. Roosevelt had put a chip on his shoulder and had dared the Nazi dictator to knock it oft. The latter had not obliged. Although American warships were plowing the Atlantic and helping the British navy and although American military aid was of such a nature and the attitude of the Roosevelt administration so pugnacious that Prime Minister Churchill was able to tell the House of Commons on July 21 that the United States was "on the verge of war," the Germans were careful not to accommodate Mr. Roosevelt by giving him sufficient grounds to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
When American troops were sent to Iceland to relieve fifteen thousand British soldiers garrisoned there, hopes that Hitler might consider this the last straw rose high in administration circles. On July 7, when Roosevelt, after being badgered by Senator Burton K. Wheeler into making the revelation, finally notified Congress of this movement of forces, he made it appear to be purely a matter of defense of the Western Hemisphere because, as Stimson confides to us, he believed that "this was a more palatable argument to the people."12 However, Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, wrote a letter to Captain (later Admiral) Charles M. Cooke, Jr., on July 31 in which he said, in the more blunt fashion of the Navy, "The Iceland situation may produce an incident.... Whether or not we will get an 'incident' ... I do not know. Only Hitler can answer."13
As it turned out, Hitler continued a cautious path. He did not give President Roosevelt the incident he was waiting for. His U-boats were instructed to keep away from American ships where possible.14 "They're keeping out of our way, apparently," said Secretary of the Navy Knox on August 16. To be sure, the American destroyer Greer was sunk on September 4 by torpedoes, but under circumstances which were far from clear on the point of whether the Greer or the German submarine had been the aggressor.15 This was clearly not the case for the President to take to Congress without fear of a rebuff. In fact, the Navy Department refused to submit the log of the Greer to inspection by the United States Senate.16
In the meantime, Mr. Roosevelt was not putting all his bets on one horse. If the 'Germans would not attack the United States, perhaps the Japanese would. The troubled waters of the Far East were full of "possibilities," to pluck a word from Lord Halifax's cryptic comment when he emerged from his private conversation with President Roosevelt in the White House on July 31. Had Mr. Roosevelt told Lord Halifax that the Navy Department had advised him in advance that the oil embargo would force Japan to make war to get oil? If they talked at all about the Far Eastern situation-and Lord Halifax said they did-this must have been mentioned,·for it was the most potent fact in that situation and it is inconceivable that the loquacious Mr. Roosevelt would have been so lacking in frankness to his visitor on a matter of their common interest that he would smother the information. In those days, it was not uncommon for intelligence which was carefully kept secret from the American people,chiefly for political reasons, to be imparted freely to the British hierarchy.
Admiral Richmond K. Turner, chief of the War Plans Division of the Navy Department, had, with the general concurrence of Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, prepared for the State Department and the President an analysis of the effects of such an embargo. This report, made on July 22, set forth the Navy's official position on the advisability of imposing the embargo. It stated that an embargo "would probably result in a fairly early attack by Japan on Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies," that it would have "an immediate severe psychological reaction in Japan against the United States," that it seemed certain that if Japan should take measures against the British and Dutch, she would also include military action against the Philippines, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war. The final recommendation was "that trade with Japan not be embargoed at this time."17
Of course to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had other objectives in mind than the maintenance of peace, this conclusion was a non sequitur. Three days later, on July 25, from Hyde Park, he issued an executive order freezing all Japanese assets in the United States and imposing a virtual embargo on trade between the two countries.18 Naturally, the British and the Dutch government-in-exile in England followed suit. Japan, which because of her natural deficiencies must trade or perish, was backed to the wall. Whether or not the Navy's analysis decided the issue for Mr. Roosevelt must remain a matter of conjecture, but we do know that when the Navy advised that the embargo would precipitate war, he promptly imposed it.
This move was palmed off on the public as an effort to deter Japan from a course of aggression. The official Navy conclusion that it would have just the opposite effect was, of course, kept secret. Five years later, the truth came out at the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack when Admiral Stark, who at the time the Japanese embargo was imposed was the top Navy man in Washington, frankly admitted that all high officials in Washington had known it meant ultimate war. Roosevelt had pulled the wool over the eyes of the American public but not over those of Admiral Stark. Stark did not even blame the Japanese. When Roosevelt cut off Japan's oil, Stark felt that "if he were a Jap," he would go and take oil where he could find it. At the Congressional hearings in 1946, Senator Ferguson put the question to him: "About the oil question, and your attitude toward Japan: Did you not testify before the Navy Court that after the imposition of economic sanctions upon Japan in the summer of 1941, you stated that Japan would go somewhere and take it [oil], and that if you were a Jap you would?"
"I think that is correct," Admiral Stark responded. "I stated it, and I stated in the State Department, as I recall, that if a complete shutdown was made on the Japanese, throttling her commercial life and her internal life, and her essential normal peace life by stopping her from getting oil, the natural thing for a Jap was to say, 'Well, I will go down and take it.'"19
President Roosevelt and Lord Halifax knew what was natural for "a Jap" to do as well as Admiral Stark did. So on that busy July 31, when the shrewd, gangling Ambassador of His Majesty's Government, armed with a portrait of Mr. Roosevelt and other touching gifts, bore down upon the President in the White House, "the various possibilities" they discussed were, it is reasonable to assume, of a distinctly bellicose nature. The term was a British understatement. "Probabilities" would have been more accurate, but it would have stirred up more embarrassing questions.
Lest the pressure on Japan be not quite strong enough, more was now applied. Mr. Roosevelt's verve was undoubtedly intensified by the realization that if Japan were kept well occupied elsewhere, she would not be a threat to the Russian flank in Siberia; and the sanctity of the Soviet Union never failed to arouse sympathy in the heart of this man, who was later to participate in carving up at least six sovereign nations with icy aplomb. His visitors, the Russian generals and the British Ambassador, had hardly departed when he tossed back his leonine head and roared again in the direction of Japan. He signed an executive order setting up a governmental office of economic warfare, known euphemistically as the Economic Defense Board, and put Henry A. Wallace in charge of it. It was simultaneously reported that administration officials had prepared "an additional blacklist" of some four hundred firms and persons doing business in Latin America and that this consisted, in large part, of Japanese concerns.20
On the following day, President Roosevelt ordered a further tightening of the gasoline and oil embargo. Comments were heard from men in the petroleum trade to the effect that the ban would seriously affect Japan.21 This, of course, tended to confirm the secret advice the President had received from the Navy that it would force Japan to seek oil by open warfare, but Mr. Roosevelt, posing as a zealous worker in the cause of preventing aggression, could count on a fair degree of public complacency and feel secure politically in the knowledge that the public was ignorant of the fact that he had flouted the recommendation of the Navy. His mood of belligerence unabated, he also had his Office of Production Management stop all processing of raw silk for civilian use. This meant the cessation of manufacture of silk hosiery, neckties, dress goods, etc.22 Since for many years the United States had been the greatest raw silk-consuming country in the world and Japan the greatest raw silk-exporting nation in the world, this was a cutting blow. In the art of incitement of international conflict, Mr. Roosevelt was as resourceful as he was adept at screening the shadow of impending consequences from public sight.
The Japanese had moved troops into southern Indochina and had established bases there by agreement with the Vichy government of France. Indochina was a French possession toward which the Russian colossus to the north had long been casting an envious eye, just as it had toward China proper. A serious Communist..inspired revolt had occurred at Yen Bay in 1930, and Soviet propaganda and agitation had continued among the Annamite peoples throughout the decade. There are those who would scoff at any analogy between the movement of American troops into Denmark's Iceland and the entry of Japanese troops into France's Indochina two weeks later. That the Japanese, Asiatics by geography and by blood, should have exhibited a positive concern for the future status of southeastern Asia is hardly astonishing. (Nor should it later have surprised anyone cognizant of the basic problems of the Far East that chaos and war raged in Indochina for many bloody years after Japan was eliminated from the scene and that American planes and guns were eventually needed there to hold at bay an enemy far more sinister than the Japanese.)
Franklin D. Roosevelt was adamant on the point of erasing all Japanese influence on the rich continent of Asia. While the British sat smugly in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Burma, while a decadent French colonialism clung, with weakening fingers, to the rice fields and rubber plantations of Indochina, and while the Kremlin was entertaining and educating Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese henchmen who were being trained to implement the Soviet blueprint for the ultimate Communization of all China and Korea and the lush lands to the south, Japan was treated to a diet of sanctimonious preachment's by the American President and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. One would have supposed from their lectures that if it were not for Japan's dream of her "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," the war lords, the bandits, and the Communist, Soviet-supported revolutionists would sheath their bloody swords and peace and amity would reign from Singapore and Batavia to Harbin. One would also have imagined that aggression and exploitation in the Far East began and would end with the Japanese.
Baffled by what they called the "lack of reality" of the Roosevelt-Hull approach, the attitude of the Japanese oscillated between propitiation and truculence, between polite amiability and explosive anger. They did have visions of empire. From their small, overpopulated islands, these energetic people saw across the Yellow and South China seas and the Sea of Japan the natural resources which they needed, not merely to achieve what they conceived to be a worthy destiny, but also to feed themselves.
But there were good reasons to hope that they could be deflected from a path of wanton aggression. These hopes brightened just one week before President Roosevelt, against the Navy's advice, cut off Japanese trade. This sequence is at least curious. On July 18, a shake-up in the Japanese cabinet had eliminated Foreign Minister Matsuoka, the proponent of close collaboration with Germany. In his place was Admiral Teijiro Toyoda, who was known to be a moderate.23 The new vice-premier was Baron Hiranuma, who had been heading a drive to suppress clandestine German activity in Japan.24 No pleasure was shown by President Roosevelt at these changes. He became all the more intransigent.
The American Ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, subsequently made impassioned efforts to arrange a meeting, in Hawaii or in Alaska, between the Japanese Premier, Prince Konoye, and President Roosevelt. Prince Konoye urgently desired the meeting. Mr. Grew, who had been at his post nine years and who understood Japanese politics and psychology intimately,believed it was the road to a rapprochement. His efforts, of course, were futile. President Roosevelt brushed them off with a bullheadedness which was possible only because the American public was not aware of the incident.
Across the Pacific Ocean came a fervent entreaty from Ambassador Grew. It was a cry of frustration from an honest public servant. He firmly believed that "a complete readjustment of relations between Japan and the United States" could be brought about if the United States would "use the present opportunity." The American people never heard this prayer because it was communicated, as diplomatic usage prescribed, in a long but secret cable addressed to Secretary of State Hull. It cautioned that further stalling by the President would convince the Japanese "that the United States Government is only playing for time" and would lead to the downfall of the Konoye cabinet, which, Ambassador Grew was convinced, was prepared to make great concessions for a peaceful solution.25
The point was not lost on the wily man in the White House, but the effect was quite the reverse of Ambassador Grew's intentions. When Mr. Roosevelt was thus authoritatively apprised of the consequences of further stalling on his part, he proceeded to stall the more and with the greater arrogance. He would not meet with the Japanese Premier to discuss anything unless the latter would surrender to all of Mr. Roosevelt's terms in advance of the meeting. This condition was, as Mr. Roosevelt knew and as Ambassador Grew had told him, an impossible one for the chief of any Oriental state to accept, particularly one faced with a delicate internal political schism.
As Cordell Hull puts it, Roosevelt refused to meet with the Japanese Premier "without first arriving at a satisfactory agreement."26 But such an agreement was impossible without the meeting. (After such an agreement, the meetings would be unnecessary.) Grew took pains to point out this dilemma (as though Roosevelt, who devised it, were not conscious of it). The absurdity was compounded by Secretary Hull's communications to the Japanese, which were such masterpieces of negativism that their recipients could not possibly know what, specifically, they were expected to agree to.27 The general intention, however, was clear: Japan was to be relegated permanently to the status of a third-rate power, dependent for the sustenance of her eighty million people upon the willingness of vested empires to trade with her and exposed, through a China chaotic from civil strife and Communist penetration, to the well-known and dreaded ambitions of the Soviet Union. Against anything short of this, the President was adamant. (As will be seen, he later [at Yalta] secretly connived to bring the Soviet army into the North China power vacuum which the collapse of Japan would create.)
Even so, Prince Konoye virtually begged to see President Roosevelt and make a try for peace. When he was brushed off repeatedly, the result was what Ambassador Grew had prophesied. The Konoye cabinet fell, and the only hope of peace was extinguished. The military dictatorship of General Hideki Tojo took the reins of power in Japan. The American people knew that Konoye had fallen. They did not know who had pushed him.
When Cordell Hull wrote his memoirs, he did not even mention that long, anguished cable from Ambassador Grew, although in its historical implications it is one of the most important documents of the time. This was not an oversight, for he devoted an entire chapter to what he labeled the "Roosevelt-Konoye Meeting," which never took place. By a slight concession to historic completeness, Hull grudgingly mentioned that Grew "recommended" the meeting, then hastened to say that Grew "could not estimate the over-all world situation as we could in Washington."28 But Joseph C. Grew was a career statesman of much broader experience in international affairs than this elderly, provincial former Senator from Tennessee, to whom Roosevelt had given an office and a title but no real authority and whom Harry Hopkins always virtually ignored. The only crucial thing Ambassador Grew did not know was that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his aides wanted war, not peace. If Hull had set forth the Grew cable in his memoirs, its contents would have demolished the structure of words which he was building to exculpate himself.
Most apologists for the Rooseveltian diplomacy of the period conveniently also omit all reference to it. It is too embarrassing. It evokes a vision of the what-might-have-been, if there had been a different President in the White House. An exception is that indefatigable Roosevelt infatuate, Professor Basil Rauch of Columbia University. In his Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor,29 he makes bold to meet this troublesome point head on. Remembering that Professor Rauch's major prior historical effort was an almost ecstatic History of the New Deal, one is not surprised that he rallies to the cause in this emergency. His solution has at least the virtue of simple directness. Ambassador Grew, says he, was wrong. The Roosevelt-Konoye meeting would have been futile because previous Japanese communications had not fully met the American terms.
If this logic is less than inexorable, it is at least faithful to the line which Secretary Hull set for loyal historians to follow when he wrote his memoirs. But the Grew plea, which Hull omitted, specifically and persuasively answers it; that was its very purpose. Grew was convinced that Konoye, at a personal meeting with the American President, could go much farther than. had been possible in formal communications. Professor Rauch, to parry the obvious retort that since war and peace hung in the balance, President Roosevelt should at least have tried to have a successful conference with the Japanese Premier, reaches into the blue and brings forth the startling excuse that Roosevelt would have been guilty of bad faith "had he then refused to sign an agreement with Konoye to implement United States cooperation with Japan in aggression."30 Not even Roosevelt had thought of this one, much less Cordell Hull. But Professor Rauch apparently finds it comforting. [Professor was such a useful idiot DC]
The latter author has been selected for mention here chiefly because he typifies a certain dwindling but still clamorous band of academicians and journalists. Having a penchant for facile categorization, which permitsthem to capture complex and even diverse ideas with a single word or slogan, they, in effect, divide all Americans of the 1938-45 years into two groups. In one group are all of those who believed that almost everything Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the conduct of foreign affairs was wise and honest; in the other are "isolationists." Naturally, these latter are dolts, intellectual pariahs, and they make up in malice what they lack in ignorance. There is no third group. There were thoughtful citizens in all walks of life who were skeptical of what President Roosevelt was up to and what it would lead to. Among them were men of broad backgrounds in international trade, diplomacy, and cultural intercourse, such as Herbert Hoover, Felix M. Morley, Hugh Gibson, and similar figures whose careers betokened the very antithesis of provincialism. No matter; they are all "isolationists."
It was, of course, Mr. Roosevelt who isolated himself when the Premier of Japan desperately sought a conference with him to try to work out a solution, other than war, to the Far Eastern imbroglio. It was he who had isolated Japan from oil, rubber, and a score of other materials vital to a modern·nation's existence. It was Roosevelt who, by a flourish of his pen, had isolated the silk industry of Japan from its American market. The word has infinite applications. Its noun compound, "isolationist," is a shotgun word that hits fifty wrong marks for each right one. Its use as an epithet verges on the puerile.
"Facts," said Huxley, "do not cease to exist because they are ignored." That Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted war, invited war, and provoked war is no longer seriously disputable. The biographical remembrance of Jesse Jones, who sat in President Roosevelt's cabinet during that historic period, to the effect that Roosevelt was a "total politician" who was "eager to get into the' fighting" to perpetuate himself in the Presidency 31 is surplus to the mass of carefully documented evidence which has already been brought to light and which points unequivocally to that conclusion. There remain, of course, the hero-worshipers, but today, only those who are blinded to the facts by partisanship or sheer idolatry can fail to admit that the Stanford University historian, Thomas A..Bailey, said a true, if shocking, thing when he wrote, in The Man in the Street, that "Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor."32
Returning our thoughts to that summer of 1941, we find that on .August 16, the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Admiral Nomura, called on Secretary of State Hull. A maddening negativism on the part of Mr. Hull pervaded this meeting, at which Nomura again pleaded for negotiations which would get beyond platitudes. But by this time Nornura was able to read between the lines. That same day, he cabled his estimate of the political situation to his government in Tokyo:
I understand that the British believe that if they could shortly have a Japanese-American war started at the back door, there would be a good prospect of getting the United States to participate in the European war. 33
This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, and worked for, and now it has come to' pass.35
It would seem that the hobgoblins Admiral Nomura saw under the bed had real flesh on their bones.
As for Franklin D. Roosevelt, .the Pearl Harbor disaster on December 7, 1941, was a great fulfillment..His wife saw him shortly after he was informed of it. She tells us that he was more "serene" than he had been for a long time.37 At the cabinet meeting that evening, Frances Perkins found that. he had "a much calmer air." Naturally; he had accomplished his purpose. "His terrible moral problem had been resolved by the event," wrote Miss Perkins.38 She spared her benefactor by choosing the word "moral." It was his political problem that had been resolved by the event. He no longer had to pretend. (Perhaps that is what she meant by his "moral problem.") Neither of these ladies say he was surprised, although at the time he let the public draw the impression that he was. In fact, Mrs. Roosevelt later let her guard down so far as to write : "We had expected something of the sort for a long time."39 Actually, American intelligence had cracked the Japanese secret code 40 and many things were known, including almost the precise time when war would begin. Only the American people were surprised. They were led to believe that their lovable President, innocent as the dew, had been lolling about in his shirtsleeves, preparing to spend. a nice homey Sunday working on his stamp collection, when the terrible shock came to him.41
At one time the stamp collector had expected the Japanese attack to come a little sooner. At a meeting with Hull, Knox, Stimson, General Marshall, and Admiral Stark in the White House at noon on Tuesday, November 25, he had predicted secretly, of course-that the United States would be attacked, "perhaps as soon as next Monday December 1."42 Later information had indicated that the blow would not come until the weekend of the seventh. One might have supposed,if one knew what Mr. Roosevelt apparently knew on that Tuesday, November 25,that if he were going to send a direct appeal to Emperor Hirohito in a dramatic effort to stave off war, he would have sent it immediately on that day. But he did not. He waited until 9 P.M. on December 6, which would assure its arrival, Tokyo time, much too late to have any effect. The message reached the hands of the Emperor twenty minutes before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.43 It was sent only "for the record," as Hull later remarked.44
It would also be good "for the record" for Mr. Roosevelt to be found blithely working on his stamp collection on Sunday, December 7. The people would naturally assume that the President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces would have been occupied doing something more useful to the country.if he had known that war was imminent. So the show of idle composure bolstered the myth. Actually, to the President, the day was to be memorable not for any progress in philately on his part but as the happy ending to his devious machinations to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot.
This disaster was the coming event which cast its shadow when Lord Halifax walked up the steps of the White House on that last day of July, the same steps which the jubilant Generals Golikoft and Respin had descended a little earlier. The American people were only vaguely conscious that Japan was the back door to war. But President Roosevelt was not. Nor were the British. They were sure of it.
Lord Halifax had his duties, as had the gentle, eloquent Lord Lothian before him. The blueprint for British propaganda in the United States in this war had been prepared with thoroughness and cold deliberation. "In the next war, as in the last, the result will probably depend upon the way in which the United States acts, and her attitude will reflect the reaction of her public to propaganda properly applied." This bit of practical realism was in Sidney Rogerson's well-thumbed book, Propaganda and the Next War, which had been published in London in,1938 and which bore an Introduction by Captain Liddell Hart.45 Both of these writers were men of high repute in British diplomatic and military circles. "Propaganda properly applied." They were candid. "Applied" on-or to-whom? Obviously, the American people, whose susceptibility to English blandishments was not an unknown quantity, having been tested before.46 Sidney Rogerson had not belittled the task of getting the United States into the coming war, for too many Americans still remembered bitterly the last great crusade which had sent them to Europe "to make the world safe for democracy." But he had seen new avenues of approach. Thus: "The position will naturally be considerably eased if Japan were involved and this might and probably would bring America in without further ado." The choice of words is revealing. The involvement of Japan-meaning a clash with Japan-would not be a calamity to be avoided; on the contrary, it would "ease" the situation.
Those gossipy but occasionally perspicacious columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S.Allen had hinted, as far back as April 24, 1940, in their "Washington Merry-Go-Round," that if the United States entered World War II, it would be through "the back door of the Pacific." This was not taken seriously, for most people took it for granted that a President who professed so vehemently to "hate war" could at least manage to keep the country out of war with Japan.
The intentions of President Roosevelt, of course, were otherwise. By the time Lord Halifax visited him on July 31, the course of events was mapped out. Mr. Roosevelt knew as .well as Admiral Stark did "what a Jap would do." He was in the process of doing those things on his own part which would make "a Jap" do the things the Navy had told him "a Tap" would do under the circumstances, namely, go on a rampage and start a general war.
So the United States was to be at war, not only with Japan, but all over' the world. But for what? Americans were to be asked to give their lives on four continents and on all the oceans of the globe. To what end?
Every war must be holy. Its stated objectives must not be prosaic, especially·if its origins are at all questionable. They must be lofty, poetic, idealistic. A novice in mass psychology would know this, and surely a master such as Franklin D. Roosevelt did. He was one to put first things first, as he used to like to say. This was his next immediate job, when August came. The war had to be made holy.
Chapter VII
DEMAGOGUERY WITH
A
GROTON ACCENT
To MAKE THE WAR HOLY-or even to give it some consistent
moral character-was not easy, particularly with Communist
Russia in it as an ally. It would take what Kipling called the
nerve of a brass monkey to talk about democracy versus totalitarianism or about fighting the anti-Christ. We were to be
linked in this great endeavor with a semi-Asiatic despotism
which had already shown an incorrigible bent toward international
piracy, an utter contempt for human freedom, and an
ideology of which atheism was a natural end product. This did not abash Franklin D. Roosevelt. The nerve of a brass monkey was exactly what he did have. He knew that we live in a propaganda age. In our time, public opinion is largely a response to propaganda stimuli exerted on a vast scale by the new techniques and instruments of the twentieth century. Nature had·bestowed upon him some rare gifts, including a magnetic personal·charm and a mellifluous voice, and he had assiduous!y cultivated the subtlest, if not necessarily the noblest, arts of politics. If any man could make red seem white, he was surely the one to do it. Thanks to the fortune of birth, he could give demagoguery a Groton accent.
Two days before, the President had revealed to Congress that American naval forces had occupied Iceland. The ebullient Willkie now told reporters that he even favored American bases in Ireland and Scotland. A newspaperman reminded him that pollsters had found the people of the United States overwhelmingly opposed to war. Willkie smiled and said that "leadership" would win out in the end.1
He had just lunched tete-a.-tete with the man who was going to do the leading. He did not reveal what was said over the lamb chops. But one story about this long conference reached the press as Willkie was leaving. According to Willkie, Roosevelt told him that friends had advised him to retain the foremost psychiatrists in the United States "to work out ways of correcting and influencing public opinion." Willkie grinned. "Mr. President," said he, "have you heard of the first meeting of your fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Albert Lasker, the advertising man?" The President had not. Willkie told how Lasker traveled to Oyster Bay, how Teddy, all smiles, teeth, and outstretched arms, burst in to greet him, crying out, "Mr. Lasker, I've been told that you have the master advertising mind in the country." Said Lasker hastily, "It would be presumptuous for anyone to claim that in your presence." "And so," said Willkie to his.luncheon host, "I think it would be presumptuous for any psychiatrist to tell you how to influence public opinion." Willkie could call it "leadership." (Rather maladroitly, he smiled as he said it.) It had different names in different parts of the world. Whatever it was, it was to be laid on thick, with a heavy trowel.
The objectives of the international Communist movement, under the aegis of Soviet Russia, were as obvious as the sun at noon. As early as 1936, the American Ambassador in Moscow had cabled to Washington: "We should not cherish for a moment the illusion that it is possible to establish really friendly relations with the Soviet Government, or with any Communist party or Communist individual."2 This cable was not made public by the State Department until May, 1952, sixteen years later.. However, the caveat should have been redundant to anyone who had ever troubled to read Karl Marx's manifesto. The virus was endemic in Communism; its fetid breath was its own ill omen to the world. There was no room for illusion. So it is that the American apologists and court historians of the 1950'S, bent on whitewashing the Roosevelt record, were in so many cases either the fools or the faithless of the 1930'S and 1940's.
As General Douglas MacArthur has reminded us, "Long before even the second World War, the Soviet was known to plan suppression of the concept of freedom and the advance of Communism throughout the world, as rapidly as conditions would permit."3 In the summer of 1941, the United States, egged on by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was about to mold those conditions to the Soviet plan. An historic apostasy in the camp of Western Christendom, even more startling than Hitler's pact with Stalin in 1939, was about to take place. Bolshevism, now stricken, was to be put under an American oxygen tent and saved; then it was to be launched on conquest and its enemies disarmed. The next generation was to wrestle with the consequences.
Lord Lloyd, in his The British Case 4 which was published in 1940 under an American imprint with a Foreword and official blessing by none other than Lord Halifax, had said the German-Soviet pact was "Hitler's final apostasy. It was the betrayal of Europe." He also had said that "Russian agents and Russian money were busy all over Europe." Sir Victor Sassoon, the British banker and a man of wide knowledge of the world, had confided to newspapermen upon arriving in New York that "Russia would be found to be the real enemy of Great Britain before long" and that the elimination of Hitler would leave that problem unsolved.5
Now in the summer of 1941, Hitler had bowed out and Franklin D. Roosevelt was bowing in as the collaborator with Stalin. However, the people were not to·see the historical import of what was taking place. President Roosevelt would divert their attention by talking only about Hitler and Mussolini and their sins, and Tojo would be cast as the only bad man of Asia. "Practical politics," Henry Adams had said, "consists in ignoring facts."
Even before there was the added embarrassment of a Communistic ally, the war faction in the United States found that it had a difficult product to sell. The people were not sure what the war was all about. Hitler and his Nazis were generally despised for their chauvinistic antics, their arrogance and cruelty, but cool heads could admit the possibility that the international mayhem committed at Versailles had left Germany with some just grievances. The British themselves were not amateurs at the power game. Did an empire which sprawled over six continents have a right, and particularly a moral right, to denounce aggressian? The British and the French, for all their obeisances to international morality, were perhaps just as cutthroat as the Germans. The only difference was one of timing; wars and pillage had satisfied their ambitions earlier. Both of them had grabbed more territories in the first World War and were exploiting them with a finesse developed in three centuries of imperialism. What had America to gain by getting into the power struggle?
Americans were in a mood to take wars with a grain of salt. In April, 1937, exactly twenty years after the United States had plunged into a war "to make the world safe for democracy," 71 per cent of those polled by the Gallup Institute believed that America's entry into World War I had been a mistake. Were they going to dash forth again in the trappings of angels and run the risk of having their children laugh at them as dupes some twenty years later? The mirages of one generation are dispersed by the revisionism of the next. Perhaps this war would spawn more problems than it would solve. Perhaps, ironically, it would beget still another war to undo the consequences of this one.
Such sentiments were not pro-Hitler. They were heard from the most divergent sources, from the National Association of Manufacturers to Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate, and such respected publicists and scholars as Harry Elmer Barnes, Stuart Chase, Quincy Howe, Oswald Garrison Villard, Sidney Hertzberg, and C. Hartley Grattan, who were as anti-Fascist as they were anti-Communist. Former braintruster and columnist Hugh Johnson said bluntly what many were thinking: "I despise Hitler and I like England but in any international war situation I wouldn't trust our fate to either of them as far as I could throw a bull by the tail."6
Men such as these naturally shunned any sympathy with the self-styled Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, which avowed its·devotion to Hitler. The Bund members were poison to their own cause. Their inept, loutish organization was repulsive to almost all Americans of German descent, who disowned it. It did der Fuhrer more harm than good. More effective for the German cause was that high priest of American Antisemitism, the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin. His racist overtones were obnoxious to the great majority of people,·but his barbs at the Allies often touched a sensitive point. At times history seemed to be irrefutably on his·side, in spite of the obfuscation and imagery with which he embroidered his tirades on the radio and in his weekly magazine, Social Justice. Father Coughlin preached that the "advance of Red Communism into Christian Europe is even a worse threat to civilization than was the rise of Hitler." He was an early prophet-if an unwelcome one-when he wrote in Social Justice on October 23, 1939: "No one condones the persecutions of Hitler, nor his pact with Stalin, but when Hitlerism has been destroyed, Communism will possess Germany-Communism at the very doors of Paris and London." The passing of Hitler, he said, would not bring tranquility to Europe, and he warned his listeners·against being deluded by the politicians into believing that it would. Naturally, the Rooseveltians hated him, and the feeling was mutual.
The United States was a maelstrom of conflicting propaganda's. 7 Protagonists of the German cause were, however, doomed to a chilly response in the long run. The Roosevelt administration put every possible legal obstacle in their path and threw the full weight of its own propaganda facilities against them. Moreover, Adolf Hitler was too unpalatable a morsel to appeal to the American taste. As for Mussolini, only too easily could he be caricatured as a.comic-opera buffoon, and the basic dilemma of overpopulated Italy slurred over. If the public was confused about the real causes of Europe's malaise, which erupted in such violent symptoms, it was also somewhat apathetic about determining them.
As for the British and the French, they sent a virtual expeditionary force to the United States, the promised land. This mobile corps invaded the drawing rooms, the lecture halls, the women's clubs, the colleges, the industrial plants, the fashion shows, even the bars. (Lucius Beebe complained in the New York Herald Tribune that he could no longer "jerk a quick one" without hearing some "British Sir Somebody Something" declaiming on "what you Americans should understand.") One battalion of the invaders was erudite, another was glamorous. In Hollywood, the Anglo-French forces scored some of their most effective advances, with such shock troops as Ronald Colman, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, and Basil Rathbone in the front line. Filmland hummed with pro-Allied activity. Charles Boyer was thought to be away in the French army when, early in the war, he suddenly arrived back in New York on his greater mission. Eve Curie was also sent over. She made charming talks about springtime in Paris, delicately interspersed with world politics. Leon Blumts brother, Rene, was on hand with a dossier on Americana and a Gallic ingenuity in probing for soft spots in the armor of American neutrality. With Alfred Duff Cooper came his wife, Lady Diana Manners, who had played the Virgin in The Miracle and who informed reporters that her trip to America was "my war work."8
This phalanx had only a limited success. Too many Americans were still unimpressed with the holiness of the Allied cause. One could not just slough off all the facts. After all, the population of Danzig was 99 per cent German;9 the checkered area of central and southern Europe was "an economic nightmare," as Hitler called it; the French, English, Dutch and Belgians did have rich colonies, while Germany had none; the rise of Hitler and Mussolini was in a sense, a reaction to chaos and despair and Marxist violence in Germany and Italy. These and a score of other incontrovertibly kept popping up in spite of the barrage of invective. They made the issues seem much less simple than they were described in the winsome pleadings of a Lady Diana Manners or in the ingratiating rhetoric of the British Ambassador. The majority of the American people had, it is true, a preference for an Allied victory, but the majority also wanted the United States to stay out of the war. Every poll confirmed that.
When the German Wehrmacht wheeled into Russia late in June of 1941 and it became clear that the defeat of Hitler would be but one face of a two-sided coin, the victory of Stalin being on the other side, the holiness of the war was even less apparent. However, the radical labor movement, whipped up by the Communists in their ranks,.made a sudden flip-flop and abandoned their anti-war stand overnight. With the mother of Bolshevism at bay, the war became, for them, a crusade. From top to bottom, the Roosevelt administration became feverish with the desire to help Russia. In other circles, there was more skepticism than ever.
Well, what did lie ahead, at the end of President Roosevelt's path? What would Europe and the world look like? What potion was he really brewing in his bubbling cauldron? Mr. Roosevelt had not said. By the end of July, 1941, it was high time that he did say. He knew that. The country had one foot in the morass of war already, chiefly as a result of his policies. Skepticism was rife. Even England, which had declared war on Germany in September, 1939, ostensibly because the territory of Poland had been violated, had not stated its war aims with any clarity. Now that the Soviet Union, which had recently had a field day ravaging half of Poland as an accomplice of Hitler, was being welcomed into the Allied camp, no one knew what would happen to Poland after an Allied victory, much less to the rest of eastern Europe or Germany.
A powerful blast at the Roosevelt policy of getting this country involved in such a war had just been prepared for public release over the signatures of the following: Felix M. Morley, a former League of Nations functionary and a recent editor of the Washington Post) then president of Haverford College; Frank o. Lowden, patriarchal former governor of Illinois; Herbert Hoover; Robert M. Hutchins, precocious president of the University of Chicago; Joshua R. Clark, former Ambassador to Mexico and a powerful Mormon; Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University and former Secretary of the Interior; AI£ M. Landon; Hanford MacNider, former Minister to Canada; Henry P. Fletcher, former Ambassador to Italy; former Vice-- President and World War I General Charles G. Dawes; the Pennsylvania Quaker figure, Joseph H. Scattergood; old-time opera star Geraldine Farrar; and writers Irvin S. Cobb and Clarence Buddington Kelland. The statement said: "The American people should insistently demand that Congress put a stop.to step-by-step projection of the United States into undeclared war.... Exceeding its expressed purpose, the Lend-Lease bill has been followed by naval action, by military occupation of bases outside the Western Hemisphere, by promise of unauthorized aid to Russia and by other belligerent moves.... We have gone as far as is consistent either with law, with sentiment or with security.... It [the war] is not purely a world conflict between tyranny and freedom. The Anglo-Russian alliance has dissipated that illusion.... Insofar as this is a war of power politics, the American people want no part in it. . .. Few people honestly believe that the Axis is now, or will in the future, be in a position to threaten the independence of any part of this Hemisphere if our defenses are properly prepared. Freedom in America does not depend on the outcome of struggles for material power between other nations."12
It was not enough to sneer at such a protestation or to brush it off as politically inspired. Was not President Roosevelt himself at least as politically minded as any of these distinguished individuals could be charged with being ? Was their patriotism any more impeachable than his? More was needed by way of answer. Mr. Roosevelt was astute enough to perceive that.
In reality, the gloomy prognostications of Hoover, Lindbergh, and the other critics of Roosevelt's war obsession were, both at the time they were uttered and later as reviewed retrospectively, unanswerable logically. They merely expressed what any objective analyst of the international facts of life would have had to concede. But could propaganda so becloud the obvious that the masses of the people would actually believe that Soviet Russia would be fighting shoulder to shoulder with America·for freedom everywhere (or even anywhere) ?
Franklin D. Roosevelt quite evidently thought this possible. It required a tour de force in the manipulation of mass psychology, which daunted him not at all. People "are governed more by feeling and sentiment than by reasoned consideration," Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf. It is difficult not to perceive that Franklin D. Roosevelt also believed this and acted upon it. The habitual political techniques of both of these men were based on the premise that man is basically irrational. Each of them was a sensational political phenomenon in his own country, Hitler with his revival of the Fuhrer legend and Roosevelt with his four terms. Each drew upon war, preparation for war, and the propaganda of war for motive power to propel himself onward and upward in his spectacular political career.
Rarely does a nation go to war without illusions. The people of the United States had not yet been given their set of illusions. This preliminary could be postponed no longer. Some beautiful war aims, innocent as the magician's fluffy white rabbit, had to be pulled out of the Presidential hat.
next
FISH AND CHURCHILL
notes
CHAPTER VI
1. Ray Brock in the Baltimore Sun, July 22, 1941, from Ankara (Copyright 1941 by the New York Times); Preston Groves, Associated Press correspondent in Istanbul, Baltimore Sun, July 28, 1941.
2. Sherwood, op. cit., 342.
3. William C. Bullitt, The Great Globe Itself (Scribner's, 1946), II.
4. Sherwood, op. cit., 327-44.
5. The Jewish community, powerful in the motion-picture industry, was understandably incensed by Hitler's anti-Semitism.
6. See Note 4 of Chapter IV, supra.
7. Careful documentation of the pre-Pearl Harbor story, with specific references to the transcript of the hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (hereafter referred to as Joint Congressional Committee), as well as other documentary evidence, is to be found in the sources cited in Note 4 of Chapter IV.
8. Foreign Relations, Japan 1931-1941 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), II, 266, 267.
9. Stimson and Bundy, Ope cit., 373.
10. Pearl Harbor Attack (Hearings of the Joint Congressional Committee), Part 5, 229y1ff.
11. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 5, 2121.
12. Stimson and Bundy, Ope cit., 373.
13. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 16, 2175.
14. The testimony of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz at the Niirn.. berg Trials in 1946 concerning orders to the German navy sheds light on Hitler's anxiety to avoid conflict with the United States. New York Times, May 9, 1946.
15. See an account in Newsweek (November 10, 1941).
16. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 16, 2210.
17. Ibid., Part 5, 2382-84.
18. See Note 8, supra.
19. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 5, 2379-80.
20. New York Times, August I, 1941.
21. Ibid., August 2, 1941.
22. Ibid., August 2, 194I.
23. Newsweek (July 28, 1941). See also Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 14, 1343, and Part 15, 1849.
24. Newsweek (July 21, 1941).
25. Foreign Relations, Japan 1931-1941, II, 645-50'
26. Hull, Ope cit., 1025.
27. For a well-documented discussion of the circumstances pertain.. ing to the proposed Konoye-Roosevelt meeting, see Chapter XII of Sanborn, Ope cit. See also Tansill, Ope cit., and Grew, The Turbulent Era.
28. Hull, Ope cit., 1025.
29. Basil Rauch, Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor (Far.. rar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1954).
30. Ibid'l
31. Jesse Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars (Macmillan, 1951).
32. Bailey, Ope cit.
33. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 12, 17·
34. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 606.
35. Churchill's address of February 15,t942,' in the New York l~imes, February 16, 1942.
36. Associated Press dispatch from London, June 21, 1944.
37. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Ren~embcr (Harper, 1949), ~33.
38. Perkins, Ope cit., 379-80.
39. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 6, 2837.
40. The intercepted, decoded messages from Tokyo to the Japanese Ambassador in Washington are given in detail in Pearl Harbor At.. tack, Part 12, 1-316. The advance information Roosevelt and his inner circle had concerning the Japanese attack is documented in the Tan... sill, Sanborn, Morgenstern, Grew, and Kimmel books. (See Note 4 of Chapter IV, supra.)
41. Forrest Davis and Ernest K. Lindley, How War Came (Simon and 8chuster, .1942 ), 4.
42. Pearl Harbor Attack, Part II, 5433.
43. Ibid., Part 2, 570; see also Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan (Simon and Schuster, 1944), 493, 497·
44. John Chamberlain, "The Man Who Pushed Pearl Harbor," Life (April 1, 1946), 94.
45. Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda and the Next War (Geoffrey HIes [London], 1938).
46. For a study of British and German propaganda drives in WorId War II, see Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States (Yale University Press, 1940).
CHAPTER VII
1. Time (July 21, 1941).
2. U.S.-Soviet Relations, 1933-1939, a collection of hitherto unpuhlished documents released by the·State Department on May 24, 1952.
3. Radio address reported in the daily press, October 18, 1951.
4. Lord Lloyd, The British Case (Macmillan, 1940).
5. New York Herald Tribune, February 24, 1940.
6. New York World~Telegram,February 5, 1940.
7. A thorough and objective discussion of propaganda in the early period of the war is to be found in Lavine and Wechsler, Ope cit.
8. New York Herald Tribune, October 23, 1939.
9. Norman Pounds, An Historical and Political Geography of Europe (Harras [London] and Chanticleer [New York], 1947),3°3.
10. Vital Speeches, Vol. VII, 583.
11. Time (August 18, 1941).
12. Statement released to the public on August 5, 1941.
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