Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 2
What is history? Is it something we decide on the best available evidence, weighing and culling the many varied accounts of the past? Or is it, instead, something to be decreed and imposed on us, decided by what some politicians say or maybe a judge somewhere? These questions may seem banal or obvious, but they have become very real —ever since the U.S. Congress recently decided to write the main tenet of a conspiracy theory into an official bill.
The amendment in question was tacked onto a defense bill and passed by both houses of Congress last October. It calls on the President to restore Rear Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Maj. Gen. Walter C. Short posthumously to the highest ranks they held at the onset of World War II.
Kimmel and Short were, respectively, the Navy and Army commanders at Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese sneak attack there; they were demoted upon their subsequent forced retirements. Asking to restore their ranks is the most, legally, that our national legislature can do. The final decision will rest with the President. Congress would like him to exculpate both men, because they “were not provided necessary and critical intelligence . .. that would have alerted them to prepare for the attack.”
This last line is the rub. It passes the buck for the fiasco at Pearl Harbor to the high command in Washington at the time, most prominently President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall. In so doing, it gives credence to the very ur-conspiracy theory of American history, the notion that Roosevelt or Marshall or both knew the Japanese attack was coming but deliberately kept the Pearl Harbor garrison in the dark, in order to maneuver America into World War II.
The backers of the bill have insisted that they are not passing on blame to any particular person or persons. Former Delaware senator William V. Roth, Jr., the amendment’s main sponsor, claims that what happened at Pearl Harbor “was a systemic failure in which the gravest mistakes were made by the Washington authorities.” But this is disingenuous, at best—a clever political maneuver that makes for bad history. If “critical intelligence” was indeed withheld in Washington, intentionally or not, wasn’t someone to blame for the loss of 2,403 American lives on December 7,1941, the “date that will live in infamy”?
A series of military and congressional investigations in the 1940s sought to answer this very question. Their general conclusions were the same as those of a 1995 Pentagon review, which determined that responsibility for the defense of Pearl Harbor that terrible day “should be broadly shared” but that “the intelligence available to Adm. Kimmel and Gen. Short was sufficient to justify a higher level of vigilance than they chose to maintain.”
The vast majority of historians concur, and they are supported by the facts. There was plenty of infamy