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December
08
2020

Pearl Harbor:  An Orchestrated Event?
Paul Craig Roberts

In November, 1944, US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson snapped to the US Secretary of the Treasury that he was worn out “from working the last two weeks on the Pearl Harbor report to keep out anything that might hurt the President.” — Churchill’s War, Vol. II

December 7, 2020.  Today is the 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that brought the US into the war against Germany and Japan. Eight American battleships were sunk or put out of action, and about 3,600 American sailors were killed or wounded.

Washington needed scapegoats, and Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short were saddled with the blame for American unpreparedness for the Pearl Harbor attack. As time passed circumstantial evidence came to light that President Roosevelt knew of the attack and permitted the devastation in order that the American people would be so outraged by the attack as to give up their resistance to being dragged into another European war.  The controversy continued for some years.  I am unsure that it was ever resolved.

When I was a Wall Street Journal editor, the chief intelligence officer of the US Pacific Fleet at the time of the Japanese attack, Admiral Edwin T. Layton, published a book, And I Was There. Layton proved to my satisfaction that foreknowledge of the attack was known in Washington, perhaps not specifically that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor, but it was definitely known that Japan was about to attack in force.  Layton attributed Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability to the tendency of Washington to monopolize naval intelligence and not share it with operational commanders.  Whether or not Layton believed this or simply could not say that the warning was withheld in order to clear the obstacle to war, I cannot say.  Nevertheless, for Washington to know an attack was forthcoming and still take no action to put Pearl Harbor on high alert or send the fleet to sea is puzzling.  Kimmel’s predecessor had been fired because he would not agree with Washington’s insistance on keeping the Pacific Fleet in such a vulnerable location as Pearl Harbor while the likelihood of war increased.

The publisher of Layton’s book sent me a copy.  As a Wall Street Journal editor with a column of my own, I assumed I could write a review of Admiral Layton’s book, but I was prohibited.

I don’t say this to embarrass my former colleagues.  My point is that the Establishment is very protective of Establishment positions and institutions.  The same protectiveness that can prevent the review of a book can prevent the correction of an obviously stolen presidential election.

Americans were brought up on the story of duplicitous Japanese who were fooling Washington with peace negotiations even as the Japanese fleet sailed to Pearl Harbor.  Reading the second volume of David Irving’s biography of Winston Churhill (published in 2001) makes it clear that it was Roosevelt and Churchill who were fooling the Japanese and manipulating them into war. 

Irving himself seldom gives his opinion.  He simply searches out all available documents and quotes from them, and he tells you where to find the documents so you can check up on him. The British and Americans had broken the Japanese codes and were reading the diplomatic and military secret messages and discussing them between themselves, sometimes withholding important information from one another.  The documents indicate that Japan did not want war with the US and Britain and was trying to arrive at a peaceful settlement of the difficulty caused by Roosevelt’s cutoff of Japan from oil.  It was obvious to all that if Japan was denied oil, Japan would have to go for the oil in Dutch Indonesia, which meant that British and US bases in the region would come under Japanese attack.  The documents show that both Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the British and Americans could not move first and that Japan had to be manuvered into attacking Britain or the US. 

Irving presents a large amount of official information, but he reports that many of the files remain under lock and key and that some files to which he gained access are empty. Some documents have been lost or misplaced or destroyed.  Obviously, the facts are not convenient for the British and American governments and are still withheld many decades later.

There are two kinds of historians: court historians who make themselves popular by telling stories that please and revisionist historians who replace reassuring histories with factual ones that are upsetting.  The latter have a rough time. This is especially the case for David Irving whose histories show that it was not only Hitler and Tojo who wore black hats but also Roosevelt and Churchill.

Once you escape controlled explanations, you can reasonably arrive at the conclusion that World War II was caused by Churchill and Roosevelt.  Churchill rode to power as prime minister on his demonization of Germany and the gratuitous British guarantee to Poland that committed the British to war against Germany.  Roosevelt caused war with Japan by a series of insults and cutting Japan off from oil.  Roosevelt knew that this would force Japan into war with the US. Just as Hitler made it clear that he did not want war with Britain and France, the Japanese made it clear that Japan did not want war with the US and Britain.  But they got war anyway.

Roosevelt wanted Britain at war, because Roosevelt knew a bankrupt and exhausted Britain could be shorn of its empire, and American financial and economic leadership would replace British financial and economic leadership.

The American Empire was indeed the main outcome of World War II.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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