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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 visored 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 Golikoff 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 tête-à-tête 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."
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.
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 tile 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 exactly 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 off. 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 preachments 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.
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 permits them 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 surplusage 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 Nomura was able to read between the lines. That same day, he cabled his estimate of the political situation to his government in Tokyo:
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:
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 it 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 Golikoff 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 Jap" 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.