by Gore Vidal
At war at least in the Pacific, how could FDR be so sure that he would get his war in Europe? Well, FDR is easily the most intricate statesman of our time: as Nixon once said admiringly of Eisenhower, “He was a far more sly and devious man than most people suspected, and I mean those words in their very best sense.”
Once the U.S. was wholeheartedly at war on December 8, 1941, our artful dodger could, under wartime powers, aid Britain and the Soviets, as he was already doing with Lend-Lease and other virtuous if quasi-legal measures. Also, FDR’s problem with his election pledge ceased to exist when the Japanese responded so fiercely to his provocations and ultimatums. As usual, he got what he wanted.
Received Opinion: without Truman’s pair of atom bombs, the famous Japanese war party that had seized control of the government would have ordered a million Japanese to jump off cliffs onto the invading Americans had not the Emperor, distressed by the bombs, etc. . . . Let us turn from comfortable RO to Authority, to Ambassador Joseph C. Grew’s memoir, Turbulent Era: A diplomatic record of forty years, 1904–1945. As U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Grew was dedicated to bringing together FDR and Prince Konoye, little suspecting that, where Konoye was apparently sincere in wanting peace, FDR was not. By autumn 1941, Grew was exasperated by Washington’s unrelenting line that the Japanese government was completely dominated by the military war party:
We in Tokyo were closer to the scene than was the Administration in Washington and we believed, on the basis of the highest possible intelligence, and so reported, that the Japanese government at the time was in a position to control the armed forces of the country. We explained in several of our telegrams to our Government that Germany’s attack on Soviet Russia had given those elements in Japan which controlled national policies further and convincing evidence that confidence could not be placed in Germany’s promises. . . . No one, I think, would contest the view that the Japanese government was in a far better position to control its forces in the summer of 1941 than it was in December 1938. . . .
The problem with RO, even when served up by so sensitive a writer as Clive James, is that contrary evidence must not be admitted. RO still clings to the myth that Japan would have fought to the end if Truman had not dropped his A-bombs. But Japanese envoys had been making overtures for a year in, variously, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, the Vatican, etc. Message: the war is over if the Emperor is retained.
Finally, the most important Japanese player, as I noted in my piece (November 10), the Emperor himself, on July 18, 1945, wrote Truman a letter “looking for peace” (Truman’s words). On August 3, 1945, an official’s diary notes that Truman, Byrnes, and Leahy were discussing a telegram “from the Emperor asking for peace.” Truman, inspired, some believe, by Secretary of State Byrnes, wanted to intimidate the Soviets with our super-weapon. So he had his two big bangs, contrary to the advice of his chief military commanders. Here is Eisenhower: “I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson] my grave misgivings. . . . I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
FDR, like so many Americans of his generation, found irresistible the phrase “unconditional surrender”—General U. S. Grant’s adamantine message to the Confederacy. FDR applied it to the Axis powers. Truman inherited this policy. Then, once he had dropped his bombs, he promptly abandoned unconditional surrender and kept the Emperor. For Clive of Canberra, I recommend the latest, if not last, word on the subject, The Decision To Use the Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth by Gar Alperovitz. For the why and what of Pearl Harbor, there is now R. B. Stinnett’s Day of Deceit, soon to be a subject of strenous debate in another journal.
Again, how could FDR have known Hitler would declare war on us after Pearl Harbor? James’s RO provides him with no sensible motive. So he falls back on the demonic—“megalomania” which drove Hitler to ensure that he would be at war on every side. But this won’t do. Hitler was certainly subject to fits of inspiration, but he was usually very cautious in his dealings with the “mongrel” Americans. In his December 11 declaration of war to the Reichstag, he gave a seemingly rational if odd reason. On December 4, at the President’s request, General Marshall had presented FDR with a war plan in which he proposed that, as Hitler was the principal enemy of the U.S. and the world, the United States should raise an expeditionary force of 5 million men and send it to invade Germany by July 1, 1943. The plan—one hopes of no more than a contingency nature—was leaked onto the front page of the Chicago Tribune, the great trumpet of isolationism. The headline, “F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS!” Three days later, Pearl Harbor erased the story, but Hitler had seen it and mentioned it as “proof” of FDR’s predatory designs on the Axis, noting (more in sorrow than in anger?), “Without any attempt at an official denial on the part of the American Government, President Roosevelt’s plan has been published under which Germany and Italy are to be attacked with military force in Europe by 1943 at the latest.” (This is from A World to Gain by Thomas Toughill, an intriguing amateur sleuth.)
Finally, for an analysis of the persisting myth about the dropping of the A-bombs, Mr. Alperovitz is hearteningly shrewd.
The Times Literary Supplement
1 December 2000
Sir,—When Kenneth Tynan came to New York to practice his trade as drama critic, he had only recently become a Marxist. Brecht had had something to do with it, and I think he may have read some of Marx. Certainly he often quoted him, usually at midpoint during one of our late evenings at the Mayfair workers’ canteen, Mirabelle. “Money should not breed money,” Ken would stammer. Upon arrival in New York, he began to evangelize. I watched him with an ancient Partisan Review editor, a former Stalinist, Trotskyite, Reichian. Fiercely, Ken told him what it was that money must never do. When Ken had run out of breath, the weary old class warrior said, “Mr. Tynan, your arguments are so old that I have forgotten all the answers to them.”
The estimable Clive James (Letters, December 8) is in a time warp similar to Ken’s. Thirty years of incremental information about the American-Japanese war have passed him by. He thinks “the real [Japanese] fleet sent no radio messages” en route to Pearl Harbor: that “was long ago invalidated.” No. What has been invalidated is the myth that the Japanese kept complete radio silence. In 1993 and 1995 (under the Freedom of Information Act), all sorts of transcripts came to light, as well as Communication Intelligence Summaries such as this one for December 6, 1941, where an American code-breaker reported: “The Commander in Chief Combined (Japanese) Fleet originated several messages to Carriers, Fourth Fleet and the Major Commanders.” Each headed towards Hawaii and interacting. Although there is some evidence that James has kept up with the latest Hirohito books (Chrysanthemum Porn, as we call it in the trade), he has no interest in political revelations. I do. But then I spent five years researching The Golden Age, trying to figure out what actually happened at Pearl Harbor, and why the A-bombs were dropped after Japan was ready to surrender, and why . . . I shall not repeat myself, but I must note, in passing, the purity of a certain mid-twentieth-century journalistic style that continues to reverberate like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom in Clive of Canberra’s burnished prose. Ingredients? High Moral Indignation, no matter how hoked up, linked to ad hominem zingers from right field. I referred to the leader of the peace party at the Japanese court, Prince Konoye. I was interested in his proposals. Our period journalist is interested in Konoye as an anti-Semite who faked his own suicide note. Is it possible that I have misjudged Konoye’s dedication to peace? Was he also, like so many Japanese princes, an adulterer? If so, was that the reason FDR refused to meet him at Juneau, an Alaskan beauty spot that is, in summer, a breeding ground for the largest mosquitoes in North America? FDR’s sense of fun seldom abandoned him. In any case, for whatever reason, after suggesting a comical venue, FDR backed down. Peace in the Pacific was not his drea
m.
Next, Charles Lindbergh, my “other questionable hero,” is dragged in, so that we can be told, with righteous anger, how “his isolationism was de facto an instrument of Axis policy.” Surely James the Latinist means ad hoc in a sentence admittedly quite as meaningless as that tom-tom pounding you you you. He does admit that “Lindbergh did loyal service [in the war] and even shot down a Japanese plane but [one] can’t help wondering about the American planes he shot down with his mouth”; moral outrage is now in high gear—pass me the sick bag, Alice, or whatever that splendid gel was called. In real life, Lindbergh was sent by FDR to take a look at the German air force and plane production. Lindbergh was sufficiently alarmed by what he saw to urge increased American production of aircraft for war, particularly the B-17. He was, of course, an isolationist, and so was reflective of a majority of the American people before Pearl Harbor.
Then, alas, we hear that “Ambassador Joseph Grew, alas, won’t do for a hero either.” Plainly my world contained no heroes. Although Grew was much admired for his brilliance and probity by those of us who had relations with him, the great Canberra moralist tells us that he was worse than an anti-Semite, he was a snob. Could it be that this terrible flaw in his character encouraged the war party in Tokyo to attack the United States? But Mr. James—again alas—never connects his enticing dots. Actually, Grew’s problem as a diplomat was that he tried to maintain the peace between Japan and the U.S., when his President had other plans which involved maneuvering the Japanese into striking the first blow so that we could go to war. But then James always dodges the great unanswered question: unless provoked by us, why did the Japanese attack? He waffles a bit about their desire for “unopposed expansion.” To where? Chicago?
Finally, a rhetorical question to me. If I had been told in 1945 that we had a weapon “so devastating that it could end that . . . war in a week,” what would I have said? Well, none of us was consulted. But we were, most of us, highly in favor of using the Bomb. On the other hand, had we been told that the war could have been concluded as of May 1945, I would have gone to work for the impeachment of a President who had wasted so many lives and destroyed so many cities in his power game with the Soviet Union which led, inexorably, to a half-century of unnecessary Cold War. I am also bemused that a witness so all-knowing, if not knowledgeable, as Clive James, still doesn’t understand what happened to him, to all of us, for most of our lives.
The Times Literary Supplement
15 December 2000
* The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987.
* “The Fruits of the MLA: I. Their Wedding Journey” (The New York Review, September 26, 1968); “II. Mark Twain” (October 10, 1968).
* Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (McGraw-Hill, 1961).
* Guy Cardwell, The Man Who Was Mark Twain (Yale University Press, 1991). This oddly repellent work might have been more accurately—and more modestly—called The Mark Twain Nobody Else Knows.
* A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt.
*As the G. W. Bush presidency begins, it looks as if Clinton was the last president, while his successor is more in the imperial Japanese mode, feeble Mikado to Cheney’s all-powerful shogunate rooted in the Pentagon.
* The Vanity Fair issue of December 1999 featured photographs of all the leaders as well as this text.
* Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency.
* Yes, there are different figures for 1992 and now for 2000 and 2001. But the trend is the same: taxes on corporate profits ever down, on individuals ever up. Now the shogunate of Cheney begins. Mikado Bush attends to the tea ceremony.
* A good chunk of Utah oil land was sold off in 1996.
** In the election of 1996, a billion dollars apiece was spent by Clinton and Dole. In 2000, Gore and Bush spent nearly $3 billion between them.
* As of 2000, USA Today reports on its front page that 6.6 million adults (3 percent of the adult population) are in prison or “correction.” No other society has ever done so deadly a thing to its people and on such a scale.
* Italics added 2000.
* When this piece was published in Russia, a number of enthusiasts elected me honorary president of the north.
* This was written for Vanity Fair before the November 7, 2000, presidential election.
* Repeated with the following message to the troops: And so Mr. President, elected by the Supreme Court (5–4), has now, in addition to a vice-president who was a former secretary of defense, appointed another former defense secretary to his old post as well as a general to be secretary of state; thus the pass was sold.
* It should be remembered that J. Q. Adams complained of Thomas Jefferson’s “large stories.” Example? Jefferson claimed to have learned Spanish in nineteen days aboard a transatlantic ship.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vidal, Gore, 1925–
The last empire: essays 1992–2000 / Gore Vidal.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3543.I26 L37 2001
814.54—dc21 00-052320
Copyright © 2001 by Gore Vidal
All Rights Reserved
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eISBN: 978-1-4000-3299-0
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