THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Last Column OLIVER LYTTELTON, the British production minister, could hardly have known it was a hornet's nest he was jabbing with his umbrella the other day. The angry buzzing and stinging...
...Eric Hawkins of the New York Herald-Tribune, a slavishly pro-British paper, and Virgil Pinkley of the United Press, agreed that they distinctly heard Lyttelton say in his impromptu aside: "America was never truly neutral...
...Hull handed the Japanese envoys an historic note, which was not published in the United States until after we had declared war Dec...
...This practice of calling things by names other than their own may enable the ruling powers to get action that would not be possible if right names were used...
...Every one of the steps we took on the road to war was described to us as a "step short of war" or a device for "keeping neutral...
...Lyttelton did a pretty fair job of describing the official American position before Pearl Harbor...
...The story in brief is this: The special Japanese peace mission conferred with Mr...
...I would agree that we were forced into war on that particular Sunday afternoon, Dec...
...7, 1941, but in the larger sense, we were at least knee-deep in war before we were attacked...
...And we did hand the Japanese an ultimatum, which, if it did not actually "provoke them to such an extent that they were forced to attack," at least convinced Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the ultimatum meant trouble in a military sense...
...We were not truly neutral...
...Lyttelton's remarks as "entirely in error as to the facts," it was the Secretary of State who most clearly recognized at the time that our official action was bound to result in hostilities...
...Krock, revealed, passed the word along that he "felt sure that the reply of Tokyo to the proposals of Nov...
...26 would be an expansion of the war somewhere in the Pacific area at the first moment that appeared propitious...
...26 note...
...Arthur Krock, chief of the Washington bureau of the New York Times and frequently unofficial spokesman for the State Department, reported 10 days after Pearl Harbor that Mr...
...There was no doubt about our sympathies...
...8. The note was little less than an ultimatum which demanded that the Japanese get out of China entirely and give up all the spoils of four and a half years of aggressive warfare...
...M.H.R...
...But the price we pay for this action, in terms of disillusionment and violent revulsion, is much too great...
...I remember the late Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox arguing, with a straight face, in a Town Meeting of the Air debate with Phil La Follette in 1939, that repeal of the Neutrality Act would strengthen our neutrality...
...My only point at the moment is that we Americans insist on a folklore or mythology in our political lives...
...Now, except for the word "provoked"—which does seem a bit harsh—Mr...
...Our progress might be somewhat slower if we called a gun a gun, and not a pacifier, but it would be a lot more certain...
...The Secretary could probably make a strong case for his position, but the final judgment, of course, is something historians will brood about when all the returns are in...
...Background To War Although Mr...
...This fact was formally confirmed last Winter with the publication of the State Department's second volume of diplomatic papers...
...Lyttelton, with what may have been the best intentions in the world, decided to depart from his prepared manuscript in addressing the American Chamber of Commerce in London...
...It is a travesty of history to say that we were forced into war...
...On Nov...
...There was no doubt where her sympathies lay...
...Hull was clearly aware of the implications of this note of Nov...
...And it is a travesty of history to say that the United States was forced into war...
...I remember how Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, debating Phil La Follette on the same program two years afterwards, argued that passage of the Lend-Lease measure would strengthen the prospect of keeping America out of war...
...The Secretary of State, his friend, Mr...
...26, Mr...
...America provoked the Japanese to such an extent that they were forced to attack...
...The angry buzzing and stinging which followed his playful jab may have taught him by now that playing with the folklore of American foreign policy can be a painful experience—especially if the playful person is a "furriner," and especially, too, if it is a campaign year...
...He may resent, and understandably so, the use of the word "provoked," but the fact remains that he knew the ultimatum was bound to have explosive results...
...Hull and other officials through the Summer and Fall of 1941...
...Our Expensive Mythology Now, Mr...
...Hull might well argue before a board of lexicographers and semantics specialists that an ultimatum to a foreign power demanding it give up the gains of four and a half years of war—an ultimatum which he "felt sure" must result in "an expansion of the war" in the Pacific "at the first moment that appeared propitious"—was not a "provocation...
...Hull "issued a warning to all departments concerned to prepare for the worst" as a consequence of the Nov...
...Hull did a great deal of spluttering in public last week, denouncing Mr...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 27
