Groupthink- Kimmel's Perspective

An Interview with Admiral Kimmel
Dean Clarence Manion

December 7. Whenever this fateful date reoccurs on the calelndar, it invariably revives a flood of tragic and painful recollections. The pain of recollection will be intensified this year when you read the recently published frank, and informative, memoirs of the widely experienced and universally respected General Albert C. Wedemeyer [Wedemeyer Reports! -- Ed.]. This big revealing book begins and ends with the emphatic and unequivocal assurance that the attack on Pearl Harbor could have been -- and should have been -- prevented, and that the United States could have -- and should have -- stayed out of World War II.

Says Wedemeyer, and I quote: "The Soviet colossus would not now bestride half the world had the United States kept out of war -- at least until Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had exhausted each other. But Franklin D. Roosevelt, the proclaimed champion of democracy," continues the General, "was as successful as any dictator could have been in keeping Congress and the public in ignorance of his secret commitments to Britain. Commitments which flouted the will and the wishes of the voters who had reelected him only after he had assured them that he would keep us out of the war. The fact that Japan's attack had been deliberately provoked was obscured by the disaster at Pearl Harbor," says Wedemeyer. "President Roosevelt had maneuvered us into the war by his patently unneutral actions against Germany and the final ultimatum against Japan."

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