Pearl Harbor after a Quarter of a Century
Harry Elmer Barnes
X: The Final Question
“
Whether
our entry into the second World War was for the good of
America
and the world will be debated for a long time, and how it is settled
should depend on the ultimate verdict as to whether the world and the
United States did benefit from our entry.”
—Harry Elmer Barnes
We
may well close the discussion of Pearl Harbor with reference to some basic considerations that relate to
the historiography of the subject. The critics of the revisionist
historians dealing with Pearl Harbor have violently criticized the
latter for placing the responsibility for the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor overwhelmingly on
Roosevelt. They reveal thereby a strange lapse of logic. Actually,
Roosevelt’s success in producing a surprise attack was an immensely,
even uniquely, adroit achievement in piloting an overwhelmingly
pacifically-inclined country into the most extensive and destructive war
of history without any threat to our safety through aggressive action
from abroad.
These
selfsame anti-revisionist critics, who so heatedly denounce Revisionists
for revealing and underlining Roosevelt’s responsibility, are the very
ones who also vehemently contend that, as a fundamental moral
imperative, we simply had to enter the second World War to preserve our
national self-respect and promote the safety and preserve the civilized
operations of the human race. Hence, Roosevelt’s success in putting us
into this war should appear to them to be greatly to his credit as a
statesman—”a good officer,” as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has described
him in this connection. Elementary logic would make it seem clear that
the anti-revisionist writers should be grateful to Revisionists for
having demonstrated Roosevelt’s responsibility for this great and benign achievement far
more definitively and clearly than the anti-revisionists have ever done.
By denying his responsibility for what is to interventionists a
superlative act of humanitarian statesmanship the anti-revisionists are
depriving him of the credit due him for his allegedly comprehensive
services to mankind.
Two
historians, Professor Thomas A. Bailey of Leland Stanford University and
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. of Harvard, were very early logical in this
matter. They admitted decades back that Roosevelt lied us into war, but contend that he did so for the good
of our country, which was not wise enough to know what was for its best
interests at the time. At the Republican convention of 1944, Clare
Boothe Luce called attention to Roosevelt’s lying the
United
States into war, but with a somewhat more cynical and sardonic
leitmotif. A complete and frank treatment of the matter is provided
by T. R. Fehrenbach in his F. D. R.’s Undeclared War (1967).
If
political deception was required to save the human race in 1941, then it
was fortunate that
Roosevelt
was at the helm in the White House at this moment and a superb virtuoso
in public mendacity (the “credibility gap”) was thus directing the
destiny of mankind. An eminent American general, and a personal friend
of mine, sent me this reminiscence:
The day that F. D. R. died, I drove General MacArthur home.
We talked of those who had disappeared from the scene since the war
started, especially of F. D. R. As MacArthur got out of the car, he
turned to me and said: “Well, the Old Man has gone; a man who never told
the truth when a lie would suffice!”
It
may be conceded that MacArthur’s appraisal of Roosevelt’s veracity is possibly a bit exaggerated, but it is
certainly an understatement to observe that the material presented in
this article makes it clear that the “credibility gap” in the White
House did not begin with Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War. Moreover,
those who believe that it was indispensable for the welfare of humanity
for the United States to enter World War II, should not speak too
unkindly of the “credibility gap.” According to their own assumptions,
it was the sole means of saving the human race from September, 1939, to
December, 1941. At least one interventionist historian has possessed
the logic and honesty to agree with my contentions. Writing in the
Chicago
Tribune of December 20, 1967, Professor John H. Collins of
Northern
Illinois
University, summarizes the situation more competently than any other
statement that I have read:
Prof.
Harry Elmer Barnes . . . has produced a detailed account of the events
leading up to
Pearl Harbor
(as reported in The Tribune Dec, 7), using documents generally
unknown to the public. And what does it all come to?
That
Roosevelt, while hypocritically pretending to desire peace, was actually
provoking, or rather plotting, a Japanese attack, and that Roosevelt was
driving for war against the Axis from 1939 on, and never meant his
“again and again” statement of the campaign of 1940.
I
say Barnes is bringing a microscope to show us an elephant. If there
were naive souls in 1940 who did not know that
Roosevelt
was for war, and was pulling every wire known to political manipulation
to get war, their simplicity cannot now be set right by any documentary
proof.
As
to Pearl Harbor, it was what
Roosevelt
had been hoping for. If he was very pious, it was what he had been
praying for. If there had been any incantation that could have summoned
it up out of a witches’ caldron, he would have been boiling newts’ heads
and snakes’ eyes in the White House kitchen.
But wherefore all the moral indignation? It was
Roosevelt’s highest duty to get the
United States into the war by whatever means would achieve that result.
Because the American people were so stupid, ignorant, and complacent as
to believe in ignoble ease and complacent sloth,
Roosevelt was compelled to lie, bamboozle, and scheme behind a
facade of pacifism.
He had the courage to disregard morality to save the
country, and his Machiavellian policy should be given its proper meed of
historical praise.
Whether
our entry into the second World War was for the good of
America and the world will be debated for a long time, and how it
is settled should depend on the ultimate verdict as to whether the world
and the
United
States did benefit from our entry. The opposing viewpoints are still as
sharply drawn and vigorously stated today as at the time of Pearl Harbor. In an article in the New York Times of August 21,
1966, Professor A. J. P. Taylor, the popular British historian,
contended that:
There
was, in my opinion, one statesman of superlative gifts and vision
between the wars. This was
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who is likely to appear to posterity as the
greatest man of his age.
The
opposing view was set forth vividly and with more factual support in a
private letter to me by Henry Beston, one of the most learned and
cultivated American scholars, literary critics, and publicists of this
century:
Roosevelt
was probably the most destructive man who ever lived. He left the
civilized West in ruins, the entire East a chaos of bullets and murder,
and our own nation facing for the first time an enemy whose attack may
be mortal. And, to crown the summit of such fatal iniquity, he left us
a world that can no longer be put together in terms of any moral
principle.
As
a realistic appraisal of the second World War, I know of nothing better
than the following comments of the distinguished journalist, author and
critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, in Esquire, February, 1968:
In
all the immense literature about the 1939-1945 war, one may observe a
legend in process of being shaped. Gradually, authentic memories of the
war—of its boredom, its futility, the sense it gave of being part of a
process of inevitable decomposition—fade in favor of the legendary
version, embodied in Churchill’s rhetoric and all the other narratives
by field marshals, air marshals and admirals, creating the same
impression of a titanic and forever memorable struggle in defense of
civilization. In fact, of course, the war’s ostensible aims—the defense
of a defunct Empire, a spent Revolution, and bogus Freedoms—were
meaningless in the context of the times. They will probably rate in the
end no more than a footnote on the last page of the last chapter of the
story of our civilization.
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