Pearl Harbor | Jane Takes On History

Congressional hearings are moving into high gear these days. Republicans have a lot of issues about which they want “transparency” and “truth and accountability”; they intend to “pursue the facts no matter where they take us”; they seek to “investigate the investigators,” etc., etc.

I’m skeptical. Not that they won’t find out what happened—they may well do that—but whether it makes any difference depends on politics. If the politics are with them they will have an impact; if not, they won’t.

I’m going to illustrate my point by sharing the history of a massive congressional investigation that took place 78 years ago. It was a whopper. The investigation went on for six and a half months and the testimony took up 39 volumes. So what happened? The majority party signed the report; the minority party dissented. Nothing much changed, except for the lives of some who were barred or discouraged from testifying and the cryptologist who bore the mental scars of trying to get the facts out for the rest of his life—and undoubtedly some others I don’t know about.

The investigation was the 1945 congressional inquiry into the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Continue reading “The Futility of Congressional Investigations”

This will be my most controversial post—perhaps my only controversial post. [1] December 7 has come and gone again, and there was little discussion of the details surrounding Pearl Harbor, except for appropriate remembrances of those who died.

A decade ago I began to research the history of the Pearl Harbor attack. I had happened upon the book Infamy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Toland, which raised disturbing questions about foreknowledge of the attack. [2] This was Toland’s third book about World War II. His prize-winning Rising Sun had treated the attack as a dastardly Japanese act; the second revealed poor communication between Washington, D.C., and Hawaii; and Infamy blamed the U.S. president and his high-level advisors for allowing the attack to go forward.

In Liberty magazine in 2010 (you can read the article on p. 39 of the October issue in Liberty Unbound ) I reviewed The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, a 2007 book by George Victor. [3] And I took the opportunity to discuss the long-standing controversy over the question, Did President Roosevelt and/or his advisors know about the potential attack and could they have taken action to prevent it?

Continue reading “The Past That Isn’t Past: Pearl Harbor”