I have always had my doubts but Jane Shaw brings the receipts.
RedDR needed the war because his communist takeover of America was failing bigly and a war empowered government like nothing else.
A decade ago I began to research the history of the Pearl Harbor attack. I had happened upon the book Infamy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Toland, which raised disturbing questions about foreknowledge of the attack. [2] This was Toland’s third book about World War II. His prize-winning Rising Sun had treated the attack as a dastardly Japanese act; the second revealed poor communication between Washington, D.C., and Hawaii; and Infamy blamed the U.S. president and his high-level advisors for allowing the attack to go forward.
In Liberty magazine in 2010 (you can read the article on p. 39 of the October issue in Liberty Unbound ) I reviewed The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable, a 2007 book by George Victor. [3] And I took the opportunity to discuss the long-standing controversy over the question, Did President Roosevelt and/or his advisors know about the potential attack and could they have taken action to prevent it?
My conclusion was, and remains, that FDR knew the Japanese were about to attack, as did his chief of staff, George Marshall, and they almost certainly knew the target would be Pearl Harbor. This is heresy to most people. In 2001, Robert Bartley, the esteemed editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, called the possibility that the president would conceal such information “wildly implausible; what commander would sacrifice most of a fleet to open a two-front war?” [4]
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
