Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Herbert Hoover's Secret History of FDR and Pearl Harbor

By Patrick Buchanan

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 that may prove yet the death knell of the West.



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.

Read the rest here.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks RW, this one is getting passed around.

    For follow up, read John T. Flynn.

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  2. My seven year old son asked me this weekend why Japan attacked the US to start our involvement in World War II. After fumbling for a few minutes I said "Do you remember a time when your older brother picked on you and bothered you so much that you just hit him to make him stop? That's what happened."

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  3. The legend of FDR has made serious inquiry and debate into this issue virtually impossible, and those that have explored the executive foreknowledge of the events at Pearl Harbor have been marginalized and ignored.

    The Internet has finally allowed anyone interested in exploring the shadowy details of this event to cut through the propaganda and see that the official history has been twisted and manipulated to make FDR seem like a hero when the truth is far less flattering.

    What's even more disgusting are the scholars and laymen that accept that FDR goaded the Japanese to attack but defend his actions as patriotic!

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  4. Two other books are VERY good on this:

    Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy, by Percy L. Greaves, Jr. Available at the Mises Institute.

    And Judge Napolitano's newest book, It's Dangerous to be Right...

    I've read both, both great reads.

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  5. Great book: Robert Stinnett, 'Day of Deceit', in which he shows the 'McCollum Memo' (which he got from McCollum's daughter), which proposed an eight point plan in Oct. '40 to provoke Japan into the first act of war. Stinnett researched his book for 17 years, and shows via documents from the archives and interviews of radio intercept personnel and officers that FDR and the military watched, in real-time, over months, the entire movement of the Japanese fleet to Pearl Harbor. Per a 1970 interview with the Naval intelligence officer at Pearl Harbor, in on the plot and who deliberately withheld intel from ADM Kimmel: 'The carnage at Pearl Harbor was worth the price to unify the American public.'

    Pearl Harbor was the forerunner of 9/11: civilian and military complicity in an attack on U.S. soil to provoke the populace to support an otherwise unpalatable war.

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  6. I thought all you people believed in "American Exceptionalism." Does that only apply when you're defending our wars in the Middle East? You're a bunch of hypocrites. Poor Japan. Expanding across China and across the South Pacific and killing thousands required oil and we wouldn't give it to them. How else could they keep ruling all of the South Pacific without bombing Pearl Harbor and killing American servicemen. This story is idiotic.

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  7. Anon @ 6:55, I take it you didn't bother reading the book...

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