Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate
On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of
Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan.
A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a
sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We
have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”
But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that
this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”
Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written
from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what
happened before, during and after the world war.
Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s
History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath is a searing indictment of
FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their
desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after
another to take us into war.
Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific
uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And
perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does
it—chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.
Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four-year
war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina,
Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.
Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister
Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United
States.
The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought
alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was
centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter
anti-American.
On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the
“pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.
The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the
United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon
which the nation and empire depended.
Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support
from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and
respond to U.S. demands.
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s
offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on
Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of
Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.
On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal
letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.
Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a
Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American
president could imperil his government.
On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.
On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell
him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as
the basis for peace. No response.
On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the
president not to let this chance for peace pass by.
On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting
to take him to Honolulu, Alaska, or anyplace designated by the president.”
No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.
In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A
for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were
rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move.
When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.
At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry
Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we
should maneuver them [the Japanese] into … firing the first shot without
allowing too much danger to ourselves.”
“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy
Secretary Frank Knox.
As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely
to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be
humiliated
Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came
scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao
Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of China.
If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr.
Hoover’s book.
