Tag Archives: Pearl Harbor

From Bettina Bien Greaves, ” Japan’s Gift to FDR,” Liberty, January, 2006:

If the President had delivered the speech he intended to give Congress on December 8 or 9, he would have been violating his pledge to the American people; he would have been sending U.S. boys to fight in a foreign war even though the United States had not been attacked; he would have been sending them to defend territory thousands of miles from our shores—the Isthmus of Kra and Singapore in Malay, and the Dutch East Indies in the Indian Ocean.

Germany’s declaration of war on the United States on December 11, and the blitz-warfare by the Japanese during the first few weeks, ensured that the American people would support the war. And so it happened that hundreds of thousands of Americans died thousands of miles from their homes, in a war the president had secretly pursued, while publicly promising to avoid.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made war inevitable. But the attack was not Roosevelt’s reason for going to war. It was his excuse.

President Roosevelt’s mendacity is conceded by even his most ardent admirers, whom are legion, especially among academics and historians. A fact-based reexamination of Roosevelt hagiography is long overdue, with his lying and covert maneuvering of the U.S. into World War II filling the middle chapters. They would be between the chapters on how the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression and how we handed Eastern Europe to “Uncle Joe” while his spies occupied important posts in our government and stole our atomic secrets. Unfortunately, much of the original record is still classified or otherwise locked away, but perhaps our grandchildren will finally learn the truth. Don’t expect the historians who have anointed him our “greatest” president to do much digging.