I see there is a lot of pressure on President Bush to apologize for the government’s failure to prevent the terrorist attacks on 9/11/01.
I am wondering if there is a precedent with FDR and Pearl Harbor. Any FDR historians out there? Did he apologize? Did anyone in his govt?
I believe that the ultimate scapegoat was Admiral Kimmel, the commanding officer of U.S. forces in Hawaii at the time. Did he take responsiblity, apologize?
The local commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel for the Navy and General W.C. Short for the Army, were initially given blame for failure to defend Hawaii adequately. The official inquiry was the Hewitt Inquiry. Although this inquiry convened in July, 1944. Due to wartime secrecy, the findings were classified. The Secretary of the Navy, however, did publicly summarize the findings, and no Court Martial was instituted. Both men were relieved of duty immediately after the attack, but not reassigned before their retirements.
Which is the long way of confirming that Kimmel and Short were tagged with responsibility.
Suggestions that FDR may have had warning that Japan was about to attack did not start to become current until after WWII, and after FDR’s death.
Hence, there would have been no suggestion by anyone that FDR should have to apologize for not defending Pearl Harbor adequately. The situations are not, therefore, very analgous.
Of course, that incident gave us the famous epic poem “The Noonday Snooze of Kimmel and Short”*.
So it wasn’t a complete loss.
*Originally performed in the royal court of Shah Guido G.
There were eight official investigations of Pearl Harbor, from the notoriously slanted Hewitt Investigation during the war to several afterward that looked more understandably on the actions and the information available to Kimmel and Short.
There is a popular historical book summarizing them, but I can’t remember the title, so you’ll have to take the commentary connected with Investigations of the Attack on Pearl Harbor : Index to Government Hearings, by Stanley H. Smith for corroboration.
But 9/11 and Pearl Harbor have virtually no meaningful points in common, and certainly the American public was not given any information about U.S. intelligence while Roosevelt was alive to make any independent evaluation of the attack.
There have been any number of books since claiming that somebody somewhere should have known and done something, and just as many if not more books saying that the lack of coordination between agencies, the slowness of obtaining and dispensing information, the considered impossibility of the attack, and the ease of connecting the dots after rather than before the attack made any inaction an inevitability.
Any irony in that sentence is deliberate.
The future is always murky, and hindsight is always 20/20. This is always true and has no correlation with any political beliefs.
Two excellent books on the Pearl Harbor attack, the investigations and the responsibility are by Gordon Prange . At Dawn We slept and Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History.
I Googled for this, & couldn’t find it.
A quote or link to the unfamiliar poem, please?
Not true- during the 1944 election, several Republicans openly asserted that FDR knew in advance that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked, and that FDR let the disaster happen in order to draw the country into war. Even Thomas Dewey, the Republican nominee in 1944, picked up that line for a while; but then several leading military folk explained to Dewey that insinuating that the US had broken Japanese military codes might encourage Japan to change said codes, leaving the US in no position to decipher future Japanese messages. So Dewey dropped the point, and got his fellow Republicans to do the same.
Another good book is And I Was There : Breaking the Secrets - Pearl Harbor and Midway by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, who was on Kimmel’s staff and has a lot to say about Kimmel, Turner, et al.
There’s an old canard that Churchill knew of the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand through intercepts, but did nothing as it suited British purposes to let the attack go ahead. (As aired on the History Channel in 1998, *Betrayal at Pearl Harbor: A Television Documentary * .
The theory is ably refuted on this page
I was aware of the 1944 election charges, and perhaps I should not have glossed over them. There were also some minor rumblings from 1 or 2 GOP congressmen in 1943. But the contemporary coverage of these charges in the newspapers I have seen under-played the charges. The Hewitt investigation, while “notoriously slanted” as Exapno puts it, received more coverage, even though the actual report was not released. I think the main point stands: For most Americans, there was little to no impression while FDR was alive that he did anything wrong or had anything to apologize for.
Disclaimer: I was not alive in 1944, and I am going by my memory of microfilmed newspapers. I could be totally off the mark.
Hey, I’ll have to agree with the first part.
Thanks for all that info; I was aware of most of those sources, but some are new.
I respectfully differ with those who say that 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are not analogous. I hear people say or insinuate that no matter what explanations there are to why Bush did not know of the impending attacks, as the man at the top, he was responsible in a formal way, and therefore he should offer an apology as the head of government.
The degree of indications that the Japanese were on a war footing with the US were certainly high, as the sources cited on this thread show.
What I am inferring from all this is that FDR, as head of government in the years before and during the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, etc. did not offer an apology as the ultimately responsible person, but instead the commissions looked for actual culpability; who really was supposed to know, so that the info could be passed up to the President, so that the president could take action.
I believe that the cases are analogous, except that Bush was not President during the well documented decline of our intelligent services, and the institution of policies that made intelligence sharing difficult, or at least had a chilling effect on such coordination, if the FBI and CIA testimony is to be believed.
Rush Limbough, trying to paint liberals as unpatriotic, proclaimed that no investigations of Pearl Harbor until after the war. Obviously, Rush was lying. Imagine that! :eek:
This is GD material now, but that is *not * entirely why so many think he owes an apology.
And FDR knew that, and knew that there were a number of “missing” Japanese aircraft carriers, and had put out the orders to do what was possible to find where they were headed (using 1941 technology, remember), and had put out the orders to all US bases in the Pacific to be on the lookout for an attack. He did not skim a short summary paper, decide it was enough that his people were looking into some of those things, and then go on vacation for a month. What actions or inactions or failures do you think FDR had to apologize for?
The commission’s finding that Kimmel and Short had essentially ignored their orders and derelicted their duty to prepare for an attack (which, granted, was thought to be more likely further west than Hawaii when it came, but that wasn’t definite) was pretty much that. The current commission hasn’t yet ruled who was asleep at the wheel on 9/11, but the people they’ve been talking to are much higher up than base commanders.
The “FBI and CIA testimony” has to be considered in the light of a natural tendency of bureaucrats to cover their own butts, doesn’t it? Best to consider all the testimony first - including the difference between bad intelligence and *ignored * intelligence.
I think that Elvis and I basically agree, despite the tone of the post.
We don’t know yet all the facts about 9/11, but even so reporters are asking for an apology – not a specific one, but a generic one, as the head of government.
I believe that until someone can point to a specific omission that creates culpability, the question of an apology seems amiss. I think we agree on that.
Elvis points that specific shortcomings can be attributed to Kimmel and Short (I personally believe that MacArthur should be in there), so that FDR is exonerated.
If it seems plausible that the culpability, if there is any, lies with the FBI and the CIA, then by the same token Bush is exonerated as FDR was. On the other hand, if someone can point to specific and reasonable act or omission on Bush’s part, then they should include that when they ask for the apology.
I haven’t seen much of this. Many wish he would take responsibility (not the same as an apology) and give an honest account for the actions or inactions of his administration in regards to the well-known terrorists threats. I am trying to phrase this in such a way to avoid GD – factually, I do not believe your cite that there is any mainstream movement for him to give an apology for the 9/11 attacks.