John
Flynn made a sound case for Roosevelt's foreknowledge
in 1946. Relying on public documents, the historian Charles
Beard did it magisterially in 1948, with his FDR and
the Coming of the War 1941. John Toland wrapped it
with Infamy
in the early 1980s. Robert Stinnett made the case all
over again a year ago with Day
of Deceit. I can guarantee to you that about five
years down the road, after the National Archives have
released another truckload of documents, someone will
be triumphantly writing that the case has "finally
been made," and someone else will be whining that
"once again the conspiracy mongers are at work."
There's
no mystery as to why this should be. As Flynn and Beard
both understood, FDR's manipulation of the attack on Pearl
Harbor goes to the very heart of executive abuse of the
warmaking power. Not matter how mountainous the evidence,
the case will always officially be "non proven,"
"a conspiracy theory." For the same reason,
despite a hundred proofs, it remains officially "non
proven," time and time, that US leaders order the
assassination of foreign leaders. By now, it should be
as soundly based in American historiography as…as…Johnson's
manipulation of Tonkin Gulf in the Vietnam War that the
White House requisitioned (with only partial success)
the deaths of Trujillo, Lumumba, Castro, the Diem brothers,
Chou En Lai, Qaddafi, and perhaps even the Swedish leftish
prime minister, Olof Palme, though this one has never
been properly settled or even mooted.
But
because the actual practice of executive assassination
runs counter to every official pretension of US honor
and fair dealing, instances of its use or intended use
have to be discounted. It's like torture, as a tool of
US foreign policy in the field. Another no no. When the
New York Times' Ray Bonner reported that a US intelligence
official might have been present at a torture session
in Central America his career went into a rapid nose dive
from which it took years to recover and only at the expense
of Bonner's political backbone.
Other
examples? The role of the CIA in supervising and protecting
smugglers of cocaine into this country in the 1980s. I
write as the coauthor (with CounterPunch coeditor
Jeffrey St. Clair) of Whiteout,
a book on this same topic, subtitled The CIA, Drugs
and the Press. Even though the CIA's Inspector General
has himself issued reports ratifying the validity of these
charges, the average press story will, to this day, refer
to "vague charges never conclusively established."
The
fate of Charles Beard tells us the cost that challenges
to these core Lies of State can extort. Earlier in the
century, Charles A. Beard was the lodestar of liberal
American historiography. Books such as his Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution and Rise
of American Civilization were among the most influential
of this century. But they were respectable. They did not
challenge core beliefs. The 1910 edition of his textbook
American Government and Politics snooted isolationist
ideas and talked placidly of cooperation with other power
in "military expeditions."
By
the 1930s Beard was changing. In 1936 he was writing that
"Having rejected the imperialist 'racket' and entertaining
doubts about our ability to make peace and goodness prevail
in Europe and Asia, I think we should concentrate our
attention on tilling our own garden." His last two books,
American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 and
the above-mentioned FDR
and the Coming of the War 1941 were written to
prove that though the "appearance" of FDR's foreign
policy was the pursuit of peace, the reality was the quest
for war.
The
liberals who had hailed him in earlier decades turned
upon him with a vengeance. In June, 1948, The Nation
entrusted Perry Miller, eminent professor history at
Harvard, with the urgent task of demolishing Beard's FDR
and the Coming of the War 1941. Miller dutifully fell
to his task, in a 700 word dismissal which ignored Beard's
painstaking documentation and concluded thus, "As
must every historian of this generation, I account myself
a child of Beard. But in the presence of this work I can
only pray to whatever divinity presides over the profession
that I may not grow old and embittered and end by projecting
my personal rancor into the tendency of history."
Frida
Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, felt that Beard
required another, more extended thrashing and assigned
Perry Miller the task of a longer profile of Beard. In
September of 1948, after homage to Early Beard, Miller
sank talons of venom into Late Beard, reporting that "his
friends plead that his deafness and isolation on a Connecticut
farm shut him off from conversation, and that he nursed
the scorpions of spiritual loneliness... He played into
the isolationist line and into the party line. One can
understand why, and even admire the massive sincerity,
but somewhere in his mind was wanting a principle of coherence
and perspective…" Summoning every nuance of contemptuous
Harvard urbanity, Miller concluded that "When it
became necessary to expand the conception of reality to
deal with a world process, it was Beard's mouth that worked
by ancient memories, and the prophet of inexorable realities
was left denouncing the history he had done so much to
create."
Mark
the crucial phrases, articulated by Miller amid the rise
of the Cold War and the National Security State, "When
it became necessary to expand the conception of reality
to deal with a world process…" And he was right. Was not
Beard a traitor to the intellectual duties of any properly
compliant professor of history? He most certainly was.
Gazing upon the newly emerging National Security State,
Beard argued that when it came to Pearl Harbor and the
entry of the US into the Second World War the ends did
not justify the means. He concluded thus: "In short,
with the Government of the United States committed under
a so-called bipartisan foreign policy to supporting by
money and other forms of power for an indefinite time
an indefinite number of other governments around the globe,
the domestic affairs of the American people became appendages
to an aleatory expedition in the management of the world….
At this point in its history the American Republic has
arrived under the theory that the President of the United
States possesses limitless authority publicly to misrepresent
and secretly to control foreign policy, foreign affairs
and the war power." What did Beard mean by "aleatory"?
The Latin word "alea" means "chance," the
whim of the Gods, and Beard was trying to catch the flapping
wing of captious imperialism.
Just
as FDR's foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack is rediscovered
every few years, so too is the fact that the Pacific war
was a very nasty affair. Last Sunday the British
Observer reported on a TV series to be broadcast
on Britain's Channel 4 this month, "containing disturbing
and previously unseen footage from the Second World War
which had languished forgotten in archives for 57 years.
The images are so horrific senior television executives
had to be consulted before they were considered fit for
broadcast."
There's
combat film of American soldiers shooting wounded Japanese
and of using bayonets to hack at Japanese corpses while
looting them. "Former servicemen interviewed by
researchers spoke of the widespread practice of looting
gold teeth from the dead – and sometimes from the
living."
The
archival film is fresh evidence of the atrocities, but
the atrocities themselves are an old story, best told
by John Dower in his 1986 book War
Without Mercy. In the February 1946 issue of The
Atlantic the war correspondent Edgar L. Jones wrote,
"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals,
strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians,
finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying in a
hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh
off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts,
or carved their bones into letter openers."
By
the spring of 1945 the Japanese military had been demolished.
The disparities in the casualties figures between the
Japanese and the Americans are striking. From 1937 to
1945, the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy suffered 1,740,955
military deaths in combat. Dower estimates that another
300,000 died from disease and starvation. In addition,
another 395,000 Japanese civilians died as a result of
Allied saturation bombing that began in March 1945. The
total dead: more than 2.7 million. In contrast, American
military deaths totaled 100,997. Even though Japan had
announced its intentions to surrender on August 10, this
didn't deter the bloodthirsty General "Hap" Arnold. On
August 14, Arnold directed a 1,014 plane air raid on Tokyo,
blasting the city to ruins and killing thousands. Not
one American plane was lost and the unconditional surrender
was signed before the planes had returned to their bases.
This
raid, as much as the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, was aimed at the Soviet Union as much as
Japan, designed to impress Stalin with the implacable
might of the United States. The Cold War was under way
and as Beard wrote in 1948, democracy wilted amid the
procedures of the national security state, whose secretive
malpractices are still being exhumed.
And
what did that liberal-left publication The Nation
think of the firebombing of Tokyo, not to mention the
dropping of the A bombs? The Nation's editor Freda
Kirchwey, unburdened by deafness or seclusion on a
Connecticut farm like Beard, was ecstatic, not only about
the A bombs but about what she called (in March, 1945)
"the five great incendiary attacks on Japan's chief
cities." She lauded "the fearsome gasoline-jell
M-69 incendiary," reporting to her readers that "the
bomb weighs six pounds, burns for eight to ten minutes
at above 3000 degrees Fahrenheit and clings 'tenaciously
to any surface'," which sounds as though she was relaying
a War Department press release. Kirchwey applauded these
incendiaries as "especially effective in cities where
so many buildings house subassembly benches for war production."
"Subassembly
benches for war production." So much for the paper and
wood houses of Japan's civilian population. Small wonder
Kirchwey saw Beard as the enemy.
Epilogue:
To be fair to Kirchwey, by the time the Korean War came
along, she was having second thoughts about the A-bomb,
and attacking the destruction of Korea in a strong editorial
in The Nation, published on March 10, 1951.
Copyright
© 2001 Alexander Cockburn
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