John
T. Flynn was
one of the first to stand up to the war hysteria, defy
the atmosphere of political intimidation, and start asking
questions. Flynn was an old-style liberal journalist,
a former columnist for The New Republic, author
of God's Gold (1932), a best-selling book on the
rise of the Rockefeller oil fortune, and also Men
of Wealth: the Story of Twelve Significant Fortunes from
the Renaissance to the Present Day (1941), who
had been purged from the precincts of "respectable" journalism
for his unrelenting opposition to US entry into World
War II. Flynn labored mightily to avert that disaster,
joining with others conservatives, mostly, and
nascent libertarians in the antiwar America First
Committee, writing, speaking, rallying and lobbying to
stop FDR's drive to war.
In
the wake of Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee
disbanded, and the "isolationists" were driven practically
underground, hounded by the government, driven out of
politics and journalism, and in some cases prosecuted
for "sedition." Flynn, however, would not be cowed. He
wrote two scathing pamphlets, The Truth About Pearl
Harbor (1944) and The
Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (1945), that raised
the question for the first time: did FDR have advance
warning of the Pearl Harbor catastrophe? Flynn answer
was yes.
It
is amazing how much he gleaned from contemporary accounts
in spite of the repressive wartime atmosphere that
allowed the President to avoid a real investigation
and it's nothing short of astounding how he was able to
cut like a searchlight through the cloud of obfuscating
murk and get at the essential truth. As it was, given
what we now know, his conclusions were fairly mild. Flynn
makes the case that FDR had every reason to expect the
Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, that he ignored the advice
of his generals, and that he deliberately bottled up the
fleet there. He reveals that the Japanese code had been
cracked, and that the diplomatic messages being sent back
and forth between Tokyo and its various embassies had
been intercepted by the British, delivered to the Americans,
and decoded. But what he didn't know couldn't know
was that much more than that had been intercepted.
As revealed in Robert Stinnett's book, Day
of Deceit, a whole series of military messages
sent by Japanese commanders betrayed the day and the hour
of the attack and Stinnett shows that FDR had to
have known this. Flynn couldn't have had access to the
thousands of pages of documents recently released
under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act
that prove FDR's foreknowledge, and that of top
figures in his administration. But Flynn saw the pattern
of deception, fifty years ago, even if he couldn't have
known the full extent of it. He is the father of Pearl
Harbor revisionism, the first writer to collect the evidence
and indict an American President for a heinous war crime
one committed against his own soldiers and
sailors.
Originally
a supporter of the President, Flynn became one of FDR's
bitterest, most relentless critics: his book, Country
Squire in the White House, so enraged its subject
that FDR wrote to one editor, at the Yale Review,
demanding that Flynn be "forever barred" from the pages
of the "respectable" media. Flynn's 1948 book, The
Roosevelt Myth, is the definitive study of Roosevelt
the opportunist and autocrat; Flynn's 1944 volume, As
We Go Marching, cited the fascist proclivities
of the New Deal in wartime. Yet in concluding that the
Pearl Harbor affair was the result of a "miscalculation,"
Flynn was giving the President far too much credit. As
Stinnett makes all too clear: instead of being a miscalculation,
the Pearl Harbor disaster was a very carefully calculated
catastrophe, one orchestrated as much from Washington
as from Tokyo. "When the attack came," writes Flynn, "[FDR]
was appalled and frightened. He dared not give the facts
to the country. To save himself he maneuvered to lay the
blame upon Kimmel and Short." If the President was appalled,
it was at his own handiwork, but there is no record of
his fear. Harry Hopkins, his top aide and,
as we now know, a Soviet agent reported that
the night before, when told that the Japanese had rejected
his ultimatum, the President had said simply and quite
matter-of-factly, "This means war."
But
if the enormity of FDR's deception was inconceivable to
even such a staunch opponent of the President as Flynn,
still he managed to glean the broad outlines of it: Flynn
knew something was very wrong about the circumstances
surrounding the biggest disaster in US military history,
and he courageously took up the cudgels on behalf of historical
truth. It is true that, as Flynn said, FDR dared not give
the facts to the country. For half a century, Admiral
Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter Short were blamed
for the disaster and the deaths, while the man who set
them up went down in the history books as the "Soldier
of Freedom." But now, all these years later, the truth
is coming out at last. Congress officially exonerated
Kimmel and Short in 1998, and Senator Joe Biden, in his
speech
to the Senate, described the great injustice done
to them as a classic case of scapegoating:
"These
officers were publicly vilified and never given a chance
to clear their names," declared Biden. "If we lived in
a closed society, fearful of the truth, then there would
be no need for the President to take any action today.
But we don't. We live in an open society. Eventually,
we are able to declassify documents and evaluate our past
based on at least a good portion of the whole story. One
of our greatest strengths as a nation comes from our ability
to honor truth and the lessons of our past.. . . I can
not accept that there is a reason for continuing to deny
the culpability of others in Washington at the expense
of these two officers' reputations fifty-seven years later."
But
if Kimmel and Short weren't responsible for US vulnerability
at Pearl Harbor, then who was? In his speech, Biden
said that the burden of guilt must be "shared"
but between who and whom?
Flynn's
trenchant pamphlet was prescient in its conclusion that
FDR had to have known a good deal about the Japanese plans.
Aside from his prescience, however, the author of The
Final Secret of Pearl Harbor was brave beyond measure:
for this was wartime America, where fear of "sedition"
suppressed virtually all dissent, and Flynn, whose work
had appeared in The New Republic, Collier's,
and Harper's, now found himself confined to a few
conservative publications, such as the Readers Digest
and the Chicago Tribune, whose publisher,
Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, was the great enemy
of the New Deal and the journalistic champion of America
First. It was McCormick who printed the first of Flynn's
Pearl Harbor articles, on October 22, 1942, and this was
reproduced in pamphlet form as The Truth About Pearl
Harbor (New York: Privately printed, 1944). When the
war ended, the "national security" dodge that had let
the administration stonewall on the Pearl Harbor question
was no longer applicable, and the cry for an investigation
went up, led by Flynn and the Tribune. On September
2, 1945, the Tribune printed another
piece on Pearl Harbor by Flynn which we have posted
as today's Spotlight article that contained
what the editor called "the blackest charge ever made
against an American." Addressing his readers, the editor
exhorted: "Read it. Read it in full. In occupies a good
many columns in today's Tribune. That space would
not have been made available if the report had not been
of such transcendent importance. We call on true Americans
everywhere to join us in seeing that the nation is told
how it was carried into the war."
Today,
as the myth of Pearl Harbor is invoked by FDR's idolators
in
Hollywood as well as Washington
we offer it to you with that same sense of urgency.
Please
Support Antiwar.com