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Book Review - "Day of Deceit" by Robert Stinnett

Prof. Randy Salzman - 4/8/2006

Recent commentary on presidential lying - Clinton's perjury and Bush's WMD - plus current readings on American public policy combine to indicate that the American system may have evolved to where, to promote any long-term outcome, our leaders may be forced to bend truth. The key to most policy, according to The World of the Policy Analyst, is not rational, non-political policy analysis. Rational analysis is cited by only about 12 percent of federal policy makers as a key to their votes. Stronger factors, in an era of the 24-hour TV news cycle and non-stop blogging, seems to be how policy can be spun for the public and whether any particular vote might turn up as the basis of an attack ad in the next election. Comparatively, effectively addressing an issue as reason for public policy is only a tiny blip on the political radar.

Rational analysis from most economists, global warming scientists and foreign policy experts, for instance, indicates that America must seriously tax gasoline to decrease our - in the president's terms - "addiction to oil." Yet few politicians, after the defeat of Jimmy Carter and every candidate from Paul Tsongas to Jerry Brown who suggested the needed tax, are willing to face the wrath of soccer moms in SUVs and Hummers. No politician since H. Ross Perot's brief flirtation in 1992 has even dared to question America's "love affair with the automobile."

Over oil, it's apparently easier to go to war than to communicate reality to Americans. According to the U.S. Geologic Survey, with 2.7 percent of the planet's proven petroleum reserves and five percent of its population, America burns 26 percent of the world's oil production. In 2005, we sent $256 billion overseas to import oil, primarily to pour into gasoline tanks of single occupancy vehicles and primarily from countries with different political and philosophical systems. In a situation remarkably similar to Japan in 1941, American energy experts since the Nixon Administration (when the United States last produced as much oil as we use) have noted that securing petroleum from "over there" is crucial.

Indeed, in American Theocracy, Republican operative Kevin Phillips notes that for the last 30 years America has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism." The U.S. military, he believes, has become a global protection force which "puts up a democratic façade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil."

Into that reality fell September, 11, 2001 and, like FDR led a unified country after Pearl Harbor into "The American Century," President Bush apparently hoped to prolong it via Saddam Hussein's defiance of UN resolutions, his WMD threat and alleged backing for terrorism. Three in four worldwide, according to a Pew Charitable Trust study, believe Bush's motivation in invading Iraq, however, was oil, not democracy. Even if none of the Bush team's claims were outright lies, the administration - packed with oil men -- certainly was hearing what it wanted to hear and saying what it wanted Americans to hear.

Was President Bush lying in the lead-up to invasion? Or was he seeing reality and attempting to repeat the history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and produce a long-term solution for a problem his country men and women refused to see?

Since the declassification of WWII materials, any number of recent books like Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, indicates that the powerful in Washington misled our grandparents to ensure America's entry into the war against fascism. The most compelling is Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit, published by Simon and Schuester in 2000. Utilizing the Freedom of Information Act to discover decrypted Japanese naval and diplomatic messages read by the White House prior to December 7, 1941; relating FBI surveillance of Japanese spies in Honolulu plus the deciphering of the Japan's Pearl Harbor bomb plot message and noting how radio direction finders followed the Japanese fleet across the Pacific, Stinnett cites FDR's 1940 systematic operational plan and concludes that not only did President Roosevelt know the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor, he goaded them into it.

"I understood the agonizing dilemma faced by President Roosevelt," Stinnett writes in modifying his "sense of outrage" after discovering FDR's duplicity. "He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in a fight for freedom. He knew this would cost lives."

Fully a third of the 374-page hardcover is footnotes and now released copies of radio intercepts, plus the "smoking gun," an 8-point plan designed to force Japan to attack American soil written by FDR's naval aide. The plan (copied as an addendum to Day of Deceit), dated September 1940, specifically mentions embargoing oil to Japan and demanding the Dutch in the East Indies - with the nearest oil to Japan - do likewise and concludes "if by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better."

Unless Stinnett forged the documents he sources, there can be little doubt FDR outright lied to the nation. Stinnett shows that FDR followed the plan step by step, doing everything possible to push Japan into committing that first overt act, while concealing much significant information from Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short in Hawaii, as well as from the American public. FDR, indeed, fired Admiral James Richardson in February 1941 when the admiral refused to follow one of the eight points in the plan and keep the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii (it was actually based in California and had been sent to Pearl on maneuvers).

Furthermore, once Kimmel became suspicious and sent his ships out to the exact area where Japan would launch its attack two weeks later, the Roosevelt Administration ordered him to recall the Pacific fleet to Honolulu and then send his two carriers to Guam and Midway Islands by Dec. 5, 1941. Amongst the navy's capital ships, only old, and strategically outdated, battleships were in port that infamous Sunday morning.

Stinnett illustrates how through radio intercepts and decryptions, American, British and Dutch radio receivers across the Pacific triangulated signals from the Japanese fleet, including the attack order. Those intercepts were accumulated in Washington, not Honolulu, and Stinnett convincingly argues that this information was kept from Pearl Harbor commanders to ensure that America's isolationist tendencies would be overcome.

If any clash took place on the open seas rather than American soil, FDR's inner staff reasoned - and some admitted in diaries and private conversations - citizens might not have supported our entry into World War II. The American public had already ignored the loss of 100 dead in the sinkings of the U.S. Panay, a gun boat in China, and the U.S. Rueben James, a destroyer in the Atlantic (which had been sunk by a Geman U-boat while convoying munitions to Britain).

Pearl Harbor's direct cost: 2,476 American dead and 1,119 wounded in
an hour and a half.

"As heinous as it seems to families and veterans of World War II, of which the author is one, the Pearl Harbor attack was, from the White House perspective, something that had to be endured in order to stop a greater evil - the Nazi invaders in Europe who had begun the Holocaust and were poised to invade England," Stinnett concludes. "Despite his pleadings and persuasions, powerful isolationist forces prevented Roosevelt from getting into the European war."

Stinnett is premature, however, in implying that the Holocaust had begun when the 8-point plan was formulated. German state-sponsored destruction of a people did not start until late January of 1942 with the infamous Wannsee Protocol. Indeed, at the plan's birth in fall 1940, Germany had not yet invaded Russia and German soldiers were not shooting (or gassing) anyone indiscriminately. At the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam's horrors ere comparatively much better documented than Hitler's were in 1940. And even three years after Pearl, most Americans - including FDR - had difficulty believing the first of the death camp accounts to escape German censorship but virtually no one three years into the war in Iraq questions Saddam's brutalities.

Roosevelt is today considered one of the greats. Having turned America into a superpower, the stunning multi-acre monument near the National Mall in Washington D.C. underscores his importance to the country while ignoring the disturbing aspects of his administration such as attempting to stack the Supreme Court and placing thousands of citizens behind barbed wire without due process of law.

Stinnett's book, with all the technological concepts in decoding and the multiple channels of communication, plus the huge holes in the historical data caused by the Navy's politically-protective destruction of any intercept files, is a difficult read. Yet it is an important one as America come to grips with the actions of Clinton and Bush and, indeed, all presidents since at least John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, of course, is famous for being caught in the U-2, Gary Powers lie and, in On Press Tom Wicker stirringly documents JFK's lie about U.S. troops in Viet Nam.

Stinnett draws out the minutia of the 1930s and '40s decoding operations and dug through thousands of Japanese military, merchant and diplomatic cables to ensure that he would not be labeled a conspiracy nut. Congress had, after all, during and immediately after the war, conducted major investigations into FDR's pre-Pearl Harbor knowledge and found him, not surprisingly, in the dark over the Japanese intentions.

Not surprisingly, because both houses of Congress were held by huge Democratic majorities and the White House was hounded by only eight reporters. There is no indication the author of the 8-point plan, Commander Arthur McCollum, ever spoke with a newsman but every radio intercept officer Stinnett could find still alive had been prevented from appearing before Congress. Today, with Congress evenly split and immensely unstable due to the growth in interest-group power, aided by a decline in party cohesion, there are 100 regular and 200-plus regional reporters attending White House press conferences* and untold numbers of bloggers determined to find fault with whomever's in office. Keeping secrets, even secret lies, is much more difficult.

In addition, attitudes toward patriotism have changed and many sub-cabinet level policy makers today rush after book contracts soon after their recommendations are not followed. Admiral Richardson, on the other hand, who knew of FDR's plan but refused to put his men in harm's way, never told the story of his involvement with the Pacific Fleet. He did, however, have this angry comment over one Pearl Harbor investigation that blamed Kimmel and Short: "It is the most unfair, unjust, and deceptively dishonest document ever printed by the Government Printing Office. I cannot conceive of honorable men serving on the commission without the greatest regret and deepest feelings of shame."

Even the eminent newsman, Edward R. Murrow, who snacked with FDR the night of Pearl Harbor, told his wife the president had revealed: "the biggest story of my life, but I don't know if it's my duty to tell it or forget it." According to Stinnett, years after the war ended, Murrow informed another journalist: "That story would send Casey Murrow through college, and if you think I'm going to give it to you, you're out of your mind."

Today, America, as the world's largest contributor to global warming, is significantly increasing the chances of additional Hurricane Katrinas. Yet, with as much as three quarters of U.S. greenhouse gas output caused by the transportation sector, Americans drive more every year. We total, according to the Department of Transportation, 2.9 trillion miles annually, burning some 163 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel, all while our sons and daughters are fighting on top of - and perhaps for - the world's second-largest oil reserves.

Since most of our average 1,500 car trips annually are for shopping and commuting and with two-thirds of our economy consumer spending, any president attempting to deal with our addiction to oil and its corresponding environmental impact, has at least one hand tied behind his back. Rational policy, as noted by Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker, would be a gasoline tax but recent history underscores the folly in asking the American public to alter behavior without a major crisis. Indeed, one significant factor in President Bush's father's 1992 loss was his retreat from "the read my lips" no tax increase pledge.

As the war in Iraq wanders into its third year and American public opinion turns further against our intervention, the question of presidential truth should be extensively examined. Perhaps our system assures that long-term thinking - whether it lead to right or wrong policy - is impossible for the public to grasp in an age of soundbites and emoticons? Perhaps our system inclines a president to chance getting caught lying for what he believes is the good of the country?

Lying under oath, as Bill Clinton discovered, may be forgiven, and lying might still lead, as is the case of FDR, to presidential greatness.