Thank you for that. I get so sick of this garbage. I despise FDR, but I think he was in the minority to see the extreme dangers posed by Germany and Japan. The "FDR-Knew-In-Advance" is one of of the lies in my book "48 Liberal Lies About American History" and, yes, it was started by a liberal (a Marxist, actually) Charles Beard.
but I think he was in the minority to see the extreme dangers posed by Germany and Japan.
Below are two paragraphs taken from, Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize”.
All that day, the reports flowed into Washington from Pearl Harbor disjointed, fragmentary, and finally, dismal. “The news coming from Haawaii is very bad.” Stimson noted in his diary at the end of that long Sunday. “It has been staggering to see our people there, who have been warned long ago and were standing at alert, should have been so caught by surprise.” How could such a disaster have occurred.
Senior American officials had fully expected a Japanese attack, and imminently. But they expected it to be in Southeast Asia. Virtually no one, whether in Washington or Hawaii, seriously considered, or even comprehended, that Japan could - or would- launch a surprise assault against the American fleet in its home base. They believed, as General Marshall had told President Roosevelt in May of 1941, that the island of Oahu, where Pearl Harbor was located, was “the strongest fortress in the world.” Most of the American officials seemed to have forgotten-or never knew-that Japan’s great victory in the Russo-Japanese War have begun with a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur.
Ah, good old Charles Beard, whose book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York; Macmillan, 1913) portrayed the Constitution as the product of a rich men's plot. Robert E. Brown demolished this view in his book Charles Beard and the Constitutuin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1956).
Beard's pupil William Appleman Williams, who also taught at Wisconsin, blamed the Cold War on the US in his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1959), which inspired a generation of "revisionist" historians who blamed the US for all of the world's problems.
Read your book and like it, and understand the context of the liberal lies.
However, beyond the marxist/liberal bent on this, there has been several scholarly works on military intel (particulary British codebreaking of jap naval codes and the comm, and lack of comm, with FDR and others in our military) with various facts that point to intentional neglect on the part of FDR.
Without going into a lot of detail, had family in the know in submarine service at the time— they had shoot to kill orders in Oct. 1941- and a whole host of other orders and negligent behaviour of DC Navy command/FDR convinced him that this was all manipulated to occur, and to cost lives. Also placed it firmly at the feet of the “limeys” and their knowledge of the jap fleet, supplied to FDR and not acted upon.
To his dying day he said this was what happened, and clearly knew why. Went through a lot as a result as many did. Now rests with full honors at Arlington, and will be remembered tomorrow.