Gore Vidal met president Kennedy.
Allereerst dit:
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (West Point, 3 oktober 1925 – Hollywood Hills, 31 juli 2012) was een Amerikaans schrijver, dramaticus en essayist… Gore Vidal werd geboren in West Point, waar zijn vader Eugene les gaf in de luchtvaartkunde aan de United States Military Academy. Zijn grootvader was Thomas Gore, een Democratisch senator en medeoprichter van de staat Oklahoma. Vidal zelf groeide ook op in de omgeving van Washington en hielp daar zijn blinde opa met het voorlezen en als gids en was zodoende al op jonge leeftijd bekend met het machtige Capitool.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal… was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.
Vidal was born into a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–1921 and 1931–1937). Vidal himself was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).
As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer… As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters.
In a September 30, 2009 interview with The Times of London, Vidal said that there soon would be a dictatorship in the United States. The newspaper emphasized that Vidal, described as ‘the Grand Old Man of American belles-lettres,’ claimed that America is rotting away — and to not expect Barack Obama to save the country and the nation from imperial decay. In the interview, also updated his views of his life, the United States, and other political subjects. Vidal had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the United States in his essay, ‘The State of the Union’ (1975):
‘There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party ... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.’ […]
Vidal said, ‘I think of myself as a conservative,’ with a proprietary attitude towards the United States. ‘My family helped start [this country]... and we've been in political life... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.’ […] In 1971, he endorsed the consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader for U.S. president in the 1972 election.
Welnu, ‘the Grand Old Man of American belles-lettres,’ schreef in The New York Review of Books van 17 mei 2001 een vernietigende kritiek op één van Ian Buruma’s opiniestukken, in dit geval diens oordeel over de Japanners en Pearl Harbor, eindigend met het advies dat het ‘van ultiem belang is’:
to insist that the truth be told about the past, as well as the present. The myths, concocted by Japanese as well as Americans, must be cracked open.
Dat Buruma zich niet aan zijn eigen advies hield, leidde ertoe dat Vidal het volgende opmerkte:
I always delight in Ian Buruma’s analyses of the ongoing political and cultural shortcomings of the Japanese [‘The Emperor’s Secrets,’ NYR, March 25]. But then how could I not? As a member of The Greatest American Generation, I served in the Pacific Theater of Operations in World War II where one was marinated in propaganda about the essential subhuman bestiality of the Japanese, a savage race who for no reason whatsoever took time off from their reasonably successful conquest of mainland Asia to sink, almost idly one Sunday morning, the American fleet based at Pearl Harbor. Why? No reason was ever given us, the innocent victims, other than we were ever so good and they were ever so bad. Although Charles A. Beard, our leading historian in those far-off days, wrote President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948), in which he made the case that the Japanese attack was the result of a series of deliberate provocations by FDR, he promptly underwent erasure at the hands of the court historians in place, as always, to demonstrate that what ought not to be true is not true.
Recently, I touched on this delicate matter in The Golden Age and, currently, R.B. Stinnett, in Day of Deceit, has analyzed FDR’s policy of provocation based on new material, much of it only released in 1995 under the Freedom of Information Act. But as Mr. Stinnett is currently making his case in these pages [Letters, NYR, February 8], I shall only respond to one of Mr. Buruma’s blithe (onbezonnen. svh) footnotes to the effect that the Japanese war party’s ‘plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor had been presented to Hirohito already in early November, after he was convinced that war with the US was inevitable. This would suggest that those who continue to believe that Pearl Harbor was really Roosevelt’s doing are barking up the wrong tree. As this bold non sequitur (drogreden. svh) suggests, Mr. Buruma himself is firmly lodged in the wrong tree. But then many Western journalists who move about the Far East are permanently dazzled (verbijsterd. svh) if not blinded by the Rising Sun.
I particularly like the notion that Hirohito (for reasons not mentioned) was, somehow, in November 1941, convinced that war with the US was inevitable. Why? Lady Murasaki has, apparently, pledged Mr. Buruma to secrecy. So let’s try to work out what was going on in November that might have convinced the marine biologist atop the Chrysanthemum throne (de Japanse keizer. svh) that an ‘inevitable’ war was coming his way not, as Mr. Buruma would have it, from the savage war party in Tokyo but from Freedom’s alabaster home itself (Washington. svh). If Hirohito had been studying his in-box, as ‘a divine priest-king’ ought, he might have suspected that the US had been trying to get a rise out of him for many years. On July 16, 1941, Prince Konoye, a would-be peacemaker, became prime minister. On July 26 (as a vote of confidence?) the US froze all Japanese funds in the US and stopped the export of oil. When Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was asked by the Japanese if some compromise might be worked out, Welles said there was not the ‘slightest ground for any compromise solution.’
Our first provocation against Japan began with FDR’s famous Chicago address (October 5, 1937), asking for a quarantine against aggressor nations. Certainly, Japan in Manchuria and north China qualified as an aggressor just as we had been one when we conquered the Philippines and moved into the Japanese neighborhood at the start of the twentieth century. In December 1937, the Japanese sank the Panay, an American gunboat in Chinese waters, on duty so far from home as the Monroe Doctrine (Amerikaans imperialisme. svh) sternly requires. Japan promptly, humbly paid for the damage mistakenly done our ship. Meanwhile, FDR — something of a Sinophile — was aiding and abetting the Chinese warlord Chiang Kai-shek.
Three years later the Western world changed dramatically. France fell to Hitler, an ally of Japan. FDR was looking for some way to help Britain avoid the same fate. Although most bien pensant Americans were eager to stop Hitler, not many fretted about Japan. Also, more to the point, a clear majority of American voters were against going to war a second time in Europe in a single generation. Nevertheless, instead of meeting Konoye (de gematigde Japanse premier. svh), FDR met Winston Churchill aboard a warship off Newfoundland. FDR said that he would do what he could to help England but he was limited by an isolationist Congress, press, and electorate. Later, Churchill, in a speech to Parliament, let part of the cat out of the bag: ‘The possibility since the Atlantic Conference…that the United States, even if not herself attacked, would come into a war in the Far East, and thus make final victory sure, seemed to allay (verminderen. svh) some of those anxieties…’ (The anxieties were FDR’s inability to come to the full aid of England in the war with the Axis.) ‘As time went on, one had great assurance that if Japan ran amok in the Pacific, we should not fight alone.’
Ik onderbreek even Vidal’s betoog met deze achtergrondinformatie van Wikipedia:
While the Emperor received detailed reports from Sugiyama and Nagano about the operations in Southeast Asia and the attack of Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Konoe (Konoye. svh) made one last desperate attempt to avoid war. That very evening, he arranged a secret dinner conference with American Ambassador Joseph Grew. He told Grew that he was prepared to travel to meet Roosevelt on a moment's notice. The ship had already been prepared. Ambassador Grew urged his superiors to advise Roosevelt to accept the summit proposal. However, in the end, Konoe's last push for a diplomatic solution was made in vain.
Opnieuw Gore Vidal:
Pointedly, FDR refused to meet Konoye, whose government was then replaced by that of General Hideki Tojo. The military, so feared by Mr. Buruma, were now in power. But though they lusted for the blood of everyone on earth, they more modestly wanted to get on with the conquest of China and Southeast Asia. Certainly, they did not want a simultaneous war with a great continental power thousands of miles away. In November 1941 they made a final attempt at peace. We now know — thanks to our having broken the Japanese diplomatic code — the contents of Hirohito’s in-box. Japan looked for a compromise. We looked for war. The Japanese ambassadors to the US, Kurusu and Nomura, were treated to a series of American ultimatums that concluded, November 26, with the following order: ‘The government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indo-China’ as well as renounce the tripartite Axis agreement. It was then, as Lincoln once said on a nobler occasion, the war came. Churchill’s anxieties were at last allayed. On November 29 Germany assured Japan that should they go to war with the US, Germany would join them. In April 1945, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, in a memorial address at Harvard, praised the late President Roosevelt, ‘while engaged in this series of complicated moves, he so skillfully conducted affairs as to avoid even the appearance of an act of aggression on our part.’ There it is.
Question to those in denial about the US as provocateur: Why is it, if we were not on the offensive, that so small and faraway an island as Japan attacked what was so clearly, already, a vast imperial continental power? You have now had over sixty years to come up with a plausible answer. Do tell.
Gore Vidal
Ravello, Italy
Typerend is dat Buruma geen antwoord had op Vidal’s simpele vraag: ‘Waarom viel, als wij niet in het offensief waren, een klein en veraf gelegen eiland als Japan’ een ‘al zo duidelijk uitgestrekte imperiale continentale macht aan?’ Het enige dat mijn oude vriend wist te melden was een herhaling van het officiële verhaal, namelijk dat:
Right-wing Japanese revisionists still argue that a US ultimatum forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact, it was more like the other way around. The Japanese armed services decided that war was inevitable if Washington did not give in to their demands by October 1941. When the US failed to do so, Admiral Nagano warned his government that the navy was running out of oil. He said: ‘The government has decided that if there were no war the fate of the nation is sealed… A nation that does not fight in this plight has lost its spirit and is doomed.’
Buruma eindigde zijn reactie op Vidal’s scherpzinnige kritiek met een oude demagogische truc door niet in te gaan op de vraag, maar door de tegenstander woorden in de mond te leggen:
One can still go on believing, of course, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was happy to sacrifice much of his navy in the hope that Hitler would join Japan in going to war with the US, something Hitler was under no obligation to do. But to believe that, you either have to be a right-wing Japanese with a political agenda (to revise the ‘peace constitution,’ promote nationalism, and revive the military spirit), or permanently dazzled, if not blinded, by conspiracy theories in Washington, D.C.
Met andere woorden: in Buruma’s liberal mens- en wereldbeeld is een uitgebreid gedocumenteerd feit niets meer dan een ‘samenzweringstheorie,’ en wel omdat, in dit geval, een wetenschappelijk verantwoord feit niet in de officiële propaganda van zijn broodheren past. Zondag 16 juni 2019 verscheen in The Unz Review de volgende boekbespreking van de Amerikaan J. Alfred Powell:
Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York, Free Press, 2000)
A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinnett published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.
Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices [p. 261-308] presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages [309-374] of closely detailed reference notes. This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. It presents the material testimony on which its analysis and conclusions are based. Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
As Stinnett shows, the plan that eventuated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was set in motion in early October 1940 based on an ‘eight-action memo, dated October 7, 1940… by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Navy Intelligence.’ Of course, it is unlikely that McCollum drafted it on his own initiative, but this is where Stinnett’s paper trail starts. ‘Its eight actions call for virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air, and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region…’ [p. 6-8; the memorandum is reproduced on 261-267]:
A. Make an arrangement with Britain for use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Complete embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
As the plan unfolded its development was closely monitored through decoded intercepts of Japanese diplomatic and naval radio communications. ‘McCollum oversaw the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941 and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy. Every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House went through the Far East Asia section of ONI, which he oversaw. The section served as a clearinghouse for all categories of intelligence reports… Each report prepared by McCollum for the President was based on radio intercepts gathered and decoded by a worldwide network of American military cryptographers and radio intercept operators… Few people in America’s government or military knew as much about Japan’s activities and intentions as McCollum.’ Knowledge of the plan was closely held, limited to 13 Roosevelt administration members and chief military officers and 21 members of Naval Intelligence and related operations [listed in Appendix E 307-308]. Item C was already US policy when McCollum wrote his memo. Item F was set in motion on October 8, Items A, B and G on October 16, 1940, Item D and E by November 12, 1940. [Chap. 1 n. 8 p. 311-312; 120 ff. etc.].
Meanwhile, also in the fall of 1940, campaigning for a third term in Boston on October 30, President Roosevelt said: ‘I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ On November 1 in Brooklyn he said ‘I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.’ At Rochester on the 2nd he said ‘Your national government… is equally a government of peace — a government that intends to retain peace for the American people.’ The same day in Buffalo he asserted ‘Your President says this country is not going to war,’ and in Cleveland on the next he declared ‘The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.’ [William Henry Chamberlin, ‘How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War,’ in Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton, 1953), Chapter Eight, p. 485-491].
Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, opposed Roosevelt’s orders [Item F] to station the fleet at Pearl Harbor as putting the fleet at risk, so he was replaced with Admiral Kimmel, with Admiral Anderson of ONI as Kimmel’s third in command at Pearl Harbor, to supervise the radio intercept operation there, unbeknownst to Kimmel. [10-14; 33-34] ‘Anderson was sent to Hawaii as an intelligence gatekeeper.’ When he arrived he established his personal housing well away from Pearl Harbor, out of range of the coming attack. Though he was commander of the seven battleships which bore the brunt of the attack with the loss of over two thousand lives, Admiral Anderson was safe at home on the other side of the mountain when the attack came. [36-37; 244, 247] Meanwhile, the commanders in Hawaii, ‘Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, were deprived of intelligence that might have made them more alert to the risks entailed in Roosevelt’s policy, but they obeyed his direct order of November 27 and 28, 1941: “The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.”’ [6-8] Afterward, they were scape-goated.
In early January 1941 the Japanese decided that in the event of hostilities with the US they would commence with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American intelligence learned of this plan on January 27 [30-32]. On July 21, 1941 Lieutenant Commander McCollum’s Item H lit the fuse. Up through late November the White House continued to block concerted attempts by Japanese diplomats to discuss an accommodation. [On this diplomatic history see Charles Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948); Frederic Rockwell Sanborn, Design For War (1951); and Charles Tansill, Back Door To War (1952).]
Beginning November 16, 1941, radio intercepts revealed the formation of the Japanese fleet near the Kurile Islands north of Japan and from November 26 through the first week of December tracked it across the Pacific to Hawaii [41-59 etc.]. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark (one of the 34 informed participants) ordered Kimmel to dispatch his aircraft carriers with a large escort fleet to deliver planes to Wake and Midway Islands. ‘On orders from Washington, Kimmel left his oldest vessels inside Pearl Harbor and sent twenty-one modern warships, including his two aircraft carriers, west toward Wake and Midway… With their departure the warships remaining in Pearl Harbor were mostly 27-year-old relics of World War I.’ That is, the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor with their crews were employed as decoys [152-154]. On 22 November 1941, a week after the Japanese fleet began to assemble and four days before it sailed for Oahu, Admiral Ingersoll issued a ‘Vacant Sea’ order that cleared its path of all shipping and on 25 November he ordered Kimmel to withdraw his ships patrolling the area from which the aerial attack would be staged [144-145]. FDR kept close tabs on the plot’s final unfolding while radio intercepts continued to track its voyage toward Hawaii [161-176].
Stinnett comments: ‘Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and its old dilapidated warships presented a mouth-watering target. But it was a major strategic mistake for the Empire. Japan’s 360 warplanes should have concentrated on Pearl Harbor’s massive oil stores… and destroyed the industrial capacity of the Navy’s dry docks, machine shops, and repair facilities’ [249]. Six months later, at the battles of Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and Midway (June 4-7), the warships of the Pacific Fleet which were at sea when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred permanently destroyed the offensive capacity of the Japanese Navy to operate in the eastern Pacific and permanently crippled its defensive capacity in the western Pacific. Thereafter, as informed observers understood, a Japanese attack or invasion of the West Coast of America was a total logistical impossibility. Nevertheless, two months later, the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens began in August 1942.
The Pearl Harbor coverup began immediately afterward with the court marshals of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, continued through eight Congressional investigations during and after the war, with the purging and withholding of documents and false testimony by participants and others [253-260 & passim; 309-310] and persisted through the Congressional hearings chaired by Strom Thurmond in 1995 [257-258]. At the date of publication (2000) numerous documents were still withheld from Stinnett or released in extensively censored form. But his case is conclusively proven on the basis of the evidence he presents, as any fair-minded reader can see. The only way to refute or debunk it would be to establish that his documentary evidence is forged, and prove it. In face of the character of this evidence, the idea is nonsensical.
A key break for Stinnett’s research was his discovery of duplicate copies of reports of Japanese naval code transmissions from the Pearl Harbor radio-intercept station routed after the war to the Belmont (California) National Archives, and still there long after the copies in the Washington, D.C. archive files had been disappeared. Recent writers pretending to debunk Stinnett’s evidence have resurrected claims that the Japanese naval codes had not been deciphered and that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence — claims that have been refuted repeatedly for decades. Famously, the radio operator of the American liner Mariposa intercepted repeated signals from the Japanese fleet steaming toward Hawaii and relayed its progressive bearings to the Navy. This was well-known during the war to American seamen of the Pacific merchant marine and is mentioned in published accounts.
The pretense that the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes had not been deciphered was first refuted in a federal court in Chicago in 1943. As her biographer Ralph G. Martin recounts, Cissy Patterson, managing editor of the Washington Times-Herald on December 7, 1941 (and for decades before and after) was opposed to American intervention in another world war — like over 80% of her fellow Americans, including her brother Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York News, and her cousin Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Serving in France as a battlefield officer, Robert was wounded, twice gassed, and decorated for valor. His Chicago Tribune, like his cousins’ newspapers and numerous others, especially off the east coast, was vocally anti-interventionist — until Pearl Harbor.
In Cissy (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979) Martin writes: ‘As the news of the disaster [at Pearl Harbor] kept coming in [to the Times-Herald’snewsroom], Cissy bitterly asked [her Sunday Editor] Roberts about Roosevelt, “Do you suppose he arranged this?” Later when she learned that American cryptographers had broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor, she was convinced that Roosevelt had known in advance that the Japanese intended to attack [418]. “The Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and two dozen other papers later printed an article by a Tribune war correspondent which indicated that the United States had prevailed [at Midway] because the Japanese codes had been broken… The Department of Justice decided to file charges that the Tribune and the Times-Herald had betrayed U.S. military secrets… Attorney General Francis Biddle felt the disclosure of this breakthrough had been tantamount to treason because it gave the Japanese the chance to change their codes. Waldrop [Times-Herald editor] was called to Chicago to testify before a grand jury… In the middle of the testimony, the Navy disclosed that a Navy censor had passed the Tribune article. Forced to drop the case, Biddle said he “felt like a fool.”’ [431-432] He wasn’t the only one.
Desondanks houdt Ian Buruma nog steeds met grote stelligheid vol dat er sprake was van een ‘Japanse verrassingsaanval op Pearl Harbor,’ én dat degenen die waarde hechten aan gedocumenteerde feiten die het tegendeel bewijzen, domweg ‘verblind zijn door samenzweringstheorieën.’ Een journalist die niet durft te twijfelen verandert als vanzelf in een propagandist. Mijn oude vriend Ian B. is daarvan een sprekend voorbeeld. Als ambitieuze exponent van de kleinburgerlijke Hollandse middenklasse is hij altijd vatbaar geweest voor kitsch.
Eenmaal hoofdredacteur van The New York Review of Books, hield hij het een jaar vol onder Amerikaanse intellectuelen, om vervolgens gedwongen te worden op te stappen. Noblesse Oblige.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten