Description:

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author, a revealing account of the events surrounding the day that the Japanese military launched a sneak attack on U.S. forces stationed in Pearl Harbor. Includes evidence that top U.S. officials knew about the attack but remained silent for political reasons and the conspiracy afterward to hide the facts. Photographs.

Review

Senator Tom Connally burst into the White House on the night of December 7, 1941, and put the question to Franklin Roosevelt bluntly: “How did they catch us with our pants down, Mr. President?” John Toland’s Infamy is a seven-hundred-page answer to that question, and it is not the answer the senator received. Toland argues that the Japanese did not catch the United States unawares; rather, the Roosevelt administration consciously permitted the Pacific Fleet to remain exposed so that Japan would fire the first shot and drag America into the European war through the “back door.” The catastrophe at Pearl Harbor was, in this telling, not an intelligence failure but a political wager—and the nine official investigations that followed were not searches for truth but successive layers of an institutional cover-up designed to protect the president and his war cabinet while scapegoating the two commanders in Hawaii, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short. The book is a formidable work of adversarial history: exhaustively researched, dramatically narrated, and ultimately a prosecution brief whose relentless accumulation of detail may convince a jury of readers even as its central thesis remains unprovable and, at key points, too tidy for the messiness of real events.

Toland structures his case around the intelligence that was in Washington’s hands in the weeks and days before the attack and the decisions—or, in his view, the deliberate non-decisions—that kept it from reaching Pearl Harbor. The Japanese diplomatic cipher, code-named Purple, had been broken by American cryptanalysts, and the resulting Magic intercepts tracked Tokyo’s intentions with unnerving specificity. From the September 24, 1941 “Bomb Plot” message that divided Pearl Harbor’s anchorage into five precisely plotted zones, to the mid-November deadline that gave negotiations until the end of the month, to the long fourteen-part message that severed relations, the signals were explicit. Yet none of it reached Kimmel and Short. Toland documents how the Purple machine itself was denied to Hawaii even as two were shipped to the British; how Captain Arthur McCollum’s December 4 warning to Pacific commanders was watered down and shelved; and how the “winds execute” signal—the pre-arranged weather-code phrase Higashi no kaze ame, “East wind, rain,” meaning an imminent break with the United States—was received at the Navy’s Station M around December 4 and then disappeared from the files. The chapters reconstructing the tracking of Kido Butai are among the book’s most gripping: the Lurline’s radio operators logging three nights of bold Japanese naval signals across the Pacific; the Twelfth Naval District’s “Seaman Z” plotting the carrier force north of Oahu; the Dutch naval attaché, Captain Johan Ranneft, being shown the task force’s position on an Office of Naval Intelligence wall map on December 2. Three days before the attack, Honolulu FBI agent Robert Shivers told a local police lieutenant, “We’re going to be attacked before the week is out… Pearl Harbor was going to be hit.”

On the evening of December 6, Commander Lester Schulz carried the thirteen-part intercept to the White House. Roosevelt read it, turned to Harry Hopkins, and said, “This means war.” Toland returns to this moment repeatedly, building it into the pivot of his argument. Hopkins suggested that it was too bad they could not strike first and prevent any surprise; Roosevelt replied that as a democracy they could not do that—but, he added, “we have a good record.” For Toland, that exchange encapsulates the administration’s thinking: keep the record clean by letting Japan attack, and trust that the fortress of Oahu—which Marshall had called “the strongest fortress in the world”—could absorb the blow and destroy the enemy fleet in a single engagement. The problem, as Toland shows, is that the fortress was not ready, because its commanders had been kept ignorant not only of the Magic intercepts but of the very fact that such intercepts existed. When the bombs fell on the morning of December 7, Kimmel stood at his window, a spent .50-caliber bullet clattering against his glasses case, and said, “I wish it had killed me.” It is a line that Toll uses to open the moral dimension of his story: the man who was set up to fail, and who would spend the rest of his life trying to clear his name.

What follows in Infamy is a minutely detailed chronicle of the post-attack investigations, and this is where Toland’s book becomes something more than a thriller about lost intelligence. It becomes a study in institutional self-protection. The Roberts Commission, convened less than two weeks after the attack, denied itself access to Magic, treated Kimmel and Short as de facto defendants without the rights of defendants, and produced a report that blamed the Hawaiian commanders while exonerating Washington. Admiral J. O. Richardson, Kimmel’s predecessor, later said, “I cannot conceive of any honorable man being able to recall his service as a member of that commission without great regret and the deepest shame.” Toland then traces the long, fitful process by which that verdict was first questioned, then partially reversed, and finally reasserted. The Hart Inquiry of 1944 put the “winds execute” and the withheld intercepts into the official record for the first time. The Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Navy Court of Inquiry, also in 1944, produced findings that placed “major blame” on Marshall and Stark in Washington. But Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal issued watered-down endorsements that blurred the conclusions for the public, while the Hewitt Inquiry and the Clausen Investigation—ordered by Stimson and Marshall themselves—systematically recanted the testimony of key witnesses like Colonels Rufus Bratton and Otis Sadtler, who had attested that they had told their superiors about the “winds” intercept.

The pattern Toland identifies is one of sequential suppression: each investigation that came too close to Washington was followed by another that softened or erased its findings. The internal Navy feuds he calls “Mutiny on the Second Deck” show how this worked at the operational level. Officers who tried to forward the Bomb Plot message or to warn Kimmel—Safford, Kirk, Bode—were outmaneuvered by Admirals Richmond Kelly Turner and Leigh Noyes, who blocked dissemination of Magic material. Safford was demoted after Pearl Harbor and spent the war “tinkering with gadgets.” Bratton and Sadtler never made general. And when Safford stuck to his account of the “winds execute” before the Hewitt Inquiry, an assistant counsel named John Sonnett tried to persuade him to recant with the line, “You do not have to carry the torch for Admiral Kimmel.” Safford refused, and he would be savaged under cross-examination by the Joint Congressional Committee two years later, while Warrant Officer Ralph Briggs—who had actually intercepted the execute message at Station M—was forbidden by his commanding officer from testifying. “Maybe someday you’ll understand the reason for this,” he was told.

The Joint Congressional Committee hearings of 1945–46 form the dramatic climax of Infamy. Toland renders them as a courtroom spectacle in which the prosecution and the defense are both sitting on the dais. Chief Counsel William Mitchell, a former attorney general, tilted the inquiry toward the administration and then resigned when Republican senators like Homer Ferguson began grilling Marshall too aggressively. “If I had known what was to happen… I would never have allowed myself to be ‘tagged,’” Mitchell admitted. Under Ferguson’s questioning, Marshall’s story came apart: he could not explain his whereabouts on the afternoon and evening of December 6; he could not recall vital conversations; he acknowledged that Purple had been shared with the British and not with the Pacific commanders. Kimmel testified that if Washington had sent him the available intelligence, “the Japanese would have found an ambush waiting for them.” Short wept on the stand as he described Marshall’s betrayal. And then, as a surprise witness, Commander Schulz appeared and recounted Roosevelt’s “This means war” remark—a piece of testimony that had been suppressed in every previous investigation.

But the most electrifying witness was Captain Laurance Safford. In eleven days of testimony, he laid out the full architecture of what he believed was a deliberate withholding, affirmed the authenticity of the “winds execute,” and accused John Sonnett of attempting to get him to change his story. When he finally stepped down, the audience in the hearing room spontaneously applauded—a moment that captures the strange moral inversion Toland’s book documents: the man who kept the secrets was treated as a hero, while the commanders who had been kept in the dark were condemned. Toland’s summing-up chapter, which opens with a Kipling epigraph—“A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East”—tabulates the improbabilities of December 6–7: Marshall horseback riding and unreachable, Stark at the National Theater watching The Student Prince while Noyes blocked the delivery of the final warnings, the fourteen-part message arriving in fragments with no operational urgency. Either this was a “comedy of errors,” Toland writes, or it was something else. He votes for something else.

It is here that the book’s architecture reveals both its power and its vulnerability. Toland is explicit that he is operating within a specific historiographical tradition—the revisionist school that runs from Charles Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 through Harry Elmer Barnes’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace to Bruce Bartlett’s Cover-Up: The Politics of Pearl Harbor, 1941–1946. This tradition has always argued, in various registers, that Roosevelt maneuvered the United States into war by provoking Japan and then concealing what he knew. Infamy is the most documentarily dense iteration of that argument, drawing on four decades of Freedom of Information Act releases, taped interviews, unpublished manuscripts, and the full record of nine official investigations. Toland’s methodology is investigative-journalistic as much as historical: he treats the official inquiries as a trail of evidence to be cross-examined, and he calls for a “tenth investigation” that would grant immunity to suppressed witnesses, open the remaining classified files, and finally produce “one more true synthesis.”

The book gains considerable moral force from the themes that run beneath its procedural surface. Toland is not merely assembling a brief about a lost battle; he is anatomizing how democratic institutions can be co-opted to shield leaders from accountability. He documents the Roosevelt administration’s systematic press manipulation—Knox’s sanitized talking points, Stimson’s press conferences designed “to keep from having a row with the Navy,” the staged release of the Roberts report. He reveals the legislative effort to permanently gag disclosure of coded material through the Thomas bill of March 1945. And in one of the book’s most disturbing passages, he details how, on November 26, 1941—eight weeks before the attack—Roosevelt personally ordered the Census Bureau to compile within hours, using armed Marine guards, the names and addresses of all 126,947 Japanese-Americans by state. The bureau denied the project’s existence until 1980. For Toland, this is not an aside; it is part of the same pattern of executive secrecy in which information is used as a weapon against external enemies and internal accountability alike.

Yet Infamy has the vices of its virtues. Toland’s thesis requires accepting a chain of inferences in which every institutional failure becomes a deliberate act. The “winds execute” message, around which so much of the case turns, remains genuinely contested; even Toland’s own sources acknowledge that the intercept logs disappeared and that key witnesses like Alwin Kramer shifted their stories under pressure. The Dutch decrypts, the “Seaman Z” plotting, the Lurline radios—Toland stacks these pieces of evidence as if their cumulative weight compels only one conclusion, but the mainstream alternative, that Washington had fragments and failed to integrate them into a coherent picture, is more parsimonious than the claim that a dozen senior officials conspired to remain silent while their fleet burned. Toland dismisses the “comedy of errors” frame almost as an act of bad faith, when in fact the history of Pearl Harbor is littered with genuine incompetence—Marshall’s notorious morning horseback ride may be inexplicable, but it is hardly inexplicable only as conspiracy. The book’s adversarial stance, while productive of enormous archival energy, sometimes slides into advocacy: evidence that complicates the “back door” thesis is noted but not granted equal explanatory weight, and the repeated call for a tenth investigation acknowledges, however unwittingly, that the case is not closed.

The closing quotation, drawn from Nietzsche—“Human, all too human”—is both an epitaph for the administration’s behavior and a kind of self-assessment for Toland’s own project. The book is human in its outrage, in its determination to give the dead their due, and in its suspicion of power. It is also too human in its need for a verdict that matches the scale of the tragedy. What Infamy does best is to establish beyond reasonable dispute that Washington possessed specific, troubling intelligence it did not share with its field commanders, that the post-attack investigations were shaped by political considerations, and that the officers who tried to tell the truth were systematically marginalized. These are not trivial findings; they amount to a serious indictment of the national security state’s habit of hoarding secrets and then burying its mistakes. Whether they amount to proof that the president deliberately let his own fleet be attacked is a different question, and one that Toland’s own evidence, however passionately assembled, does not settle.

Read Infamy not as the last word but as an essential corrective: a reminder that the most destructive intelligence failure is not the one that misses a clue but the one that is structured so that the people who need the clues are never allowed to see them. Read it for Safford refusing to carry the torch and then being applauded by strangers; for Kimmel waiting decades for a clearance that never came; for the cryptanalyst William Friedman repeating “But they knew, they knew, they knew” when the news of the attack broke. Toland’s book is a monument to their testimony and a warning about the costs of state secrecy—even if, in the end, it asks us to believe that the failure was not a failure at all, but a choice.

Notable Quotes

This means war.

Roosevelt's reaction upon reading the thirteen parts of the Japanese message on the evening of December 6, 1941, as witnessed by Harry Hopkins and later confirmed by Commander Schulz's testimony. — foreknowledge, Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, war

I wish it had killed me.

Admiral Kimmel's response after a spent .50-caliber bullet struck the left breast of his white uniform during the attack, smacking into his glasses case. He picked it up, put it in his pocket, and said these words, knowing his career was over. — honor, responsibility, Pearl Harbor, military leadership

But they knew, they knew, they knew.

Army cryptanalyst William F. Friedman, whose team had solved the Purple code, pacing back and forth after hearing of the Pearl Harbor attack, muttering to himself repeatedly. — foreknowledge, intelligence, cover-up, cryptanalysis

Admiral Kimmel is the victim of the dirtiest frame-up in the history of the Navy. And I have the proof of it.

Captain Safford's declaration to Admiral Harris when requesting to see Kimmel in February 1944, after two years of research into the withheld intelligence. — scapegoating, cover-up, justice, military honor

Words don't alter facts. In the eyes of the American people I am on trial and nothing you can say will alter that.

Kimmel's reply to Justice Roberts when told 'Admiral, you are not on trial' during the Roberts Commission hearings in Hawaii, January 1942. — justice, accountability, public opinion, scapegoating

I have no personal interest, except I started it and I have got to see it through.

Captain Safford's response when asked by Congressman Keefe what personal interest he had in the Pearl Harbor controversy, prompting a third round of spontaneous applause from spectators. — integrity, courage, whistleblowing, conscience

There is an appearance of it.

Safford's nervous reply when asked by Chief Counsel Richardson whether he believed there was a conspiracy between the Navy and War Departments to destroy copies of the winds execute message. — cover-up, conspiracy, document destruction, intelligence

Darling, the fleet's at the bottom of the sea. Nobody must know that here, but I've got to tell you.

Admiral Nimitz to his wife upon learning he was to replace Kimmel as commander of the Pacific Fleet, after she congratulated him on achieving his dream posting. — Pearl Harbor aftermath, military command, secrecy

How did they catch us with our pants down, Mr. President?

Senator Tom Connally's furious question to Roosevelt at the emergency White House meeting the night of December 7, 1941, banging the desk as he sprang to his feet. — accountability, Pearl Harbor, Congress, surprise attack

If I had known the true situation, I could have babied the Japanese along quite a while longer.

Roosevelt's words to Admiral Hart, quoting what he told Hart about being assured by Marshall that forces in the Philippines were ready for war in November 1941. — foreknowledge, Roosevelt, diplomacy, deception

The committee report, I feel, does not with exactitude apply the same yardstick in measuring responsibilities at Washington as had been applied to the Hawaiian commanders. I cannot suppress the feeling that the committee report endeavors to throw as soft a light as possible on the Washington scene.

Congressman Keefe's 'Additional Views' statement, condemning the bias of the majority report of the Joint Congressional Committee investigation. — cover-up, accountability, investigation, political bias

No, we can't do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people. But we have a good record.

Roosevelt's response to Hopkins on the night of December 6, 1941, after Hopkins suggested it was too bad they could not strike first, as testified by Commander Schulz. — Roosevelt, democracy, war, Pearl Harbor eve

Gentlemen, this goes to the grave with us.

Marshall's alleged instruction to half a dozen officers shortly after Pearl Harbor, ordering a lid put on the affair, as reported by an unnamed officer who attended the meeting. — cover-up, military secrecy, accountability, Marshall

It is the oldest trick in the book, to try to put the chief witness for the prosecution on the defensive or to try to make the victim responsible for his own murder.

Safford's written observation about Representative Murphy's aggressive cross-examination tactic of blaming Safford for being in pajamas on the morning of December 7. — cross-examination, blame-shifting, investigation tactics, justice

A more disgraceful spectacle has never been presented to this country during my lifetime than the failure of the civilian officials of the Government to show any willingness to take their share of responsibility for the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor.

Admiral J. O. Richardson, Kimmel's predecessor as Pacific Fleet commander, condemning the government's refusal to accept blame. — accountability, leadership, scapegoating, institutional failure

The greater tragedy is that the war with Japan was one that need never have been fought.

Toland's concluding assessment, placing Pearl Harbor within the larger tragedy of a Pacific war he considers avoidable. — war, tragedy, diplomacy, historical judgment

Why, this is wicked! This is wicked.

Roosevelt's reaction upon reading the Army Pearl Harbor Board's conclusions criticizing Marshall, before ordering the findings suppressed and sealed. — cover-up, Roosevelt, Marshall, investigation

I was standing almost alone at that time.

Safford's explanation for why he could not name who would make trouble for him if he told the truth, during Murphy's relentless cross-examination at the congressional hearings. — whistleblowing, isolation, courage, institutional pressure

That son of a bitch has now killed my son!

Kimmel's private reaction upon learning his son Manning's submarine had been lost in the Philippines, referring to Roosevelt, whom he held responsible for the war. — personal cost, war, grief, responsibility

Poor George Marshall, he will be the only high ranking officer who will never be able to write his own memoirs.

General Short's observation to his son after the congressional Pearl Harbor hearings, reflecting on how Marshall's lies about Pearl Harbor would prevent him from ever writing candidly about his wartime service. — cover-up, Marshall, historical truth, conscience