Percy Greaves’s Pearl Harbor: Seeds and Fruits of Infamy is now published – a 1000-page tome that is the most comprehensive book on the topic now in print. The book comes as something of a shock, since the documents and interviews in here have been shrouded in a kind of mystery and secrecy for many decades.
I had known that Bettina Greaves had been working on preparing this manuscript after Percy died in 1984. It finally became ready for publication, and I had a chance to look at it during this period. Previously I had read a few essays on the “backdoor-to-the-war” theory but nothing this detailed or this comprehensive. The author’s tone is moderate and balanced, and he systematically avoids any sensationalism. The method, apparatus, and argument are scholarly in every way. Even so, what struck me was how strangely familiar the scenario he lays out really is in our times.
Consider: a brutal attack on American soil comes from a foreign source. Death and destruction are everywhere. The nation is furious and thirsty for vengeance. The search is on for the perpetrators and those in government who failed to see it coming. The ruling administration goes to war while manufacturing a cover-up of the details. Congress investigates and eventually produces a report that exonerates the President and the security apparatus that did not work to prevent the attack, while blaming those closest to the disaster.
This scenario might apply to 9/11; recall that it was airport security that caught the blame, and not the Bush administration. And then began the “war on terror” that has bloated government security, escalated military conflicts the world over, and expanded government power to unspeakable levels. Conspiracy theories abound because government has never really come clean.
The attack from sixty years earlier followed a similar trajectory. As with 9/11, Franklin Roosevelt had pursued a range of policies that provoked the attack. It was no secret that he wanted to enter the war. For years, historians have pointed to evidence that FDR possessed intelligence that demonstrated high risk of attack. What if Pearl Harbor was merely the excuse FDR needed to enter the war and not the actual reason? What if he was fully aware that an attack might have been expected? What if the Congressional report that appeared after was more of a cover-up than anything else? These are the questions that this book seeks to answer. Even if you have never been very interesting in what may seem to many like ancient history, this book is worth examining as an archetype of wartime paradigm and the way the state uses foreign attacks to ramp up its own agenda.
