Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Roberta Wohlstetter, Separating Wheat from Chaff

Roberta Wohlstetter died. I ran into her work back in 60's. I had done a paper on Pearl Harbor early in my collegiate career which introduced me to the conspiracy theorists and reasonable historians who wrote on it. (Some were the same--like Charles Beard.) The conspiracy theory went that since we had broken the Japanese codes FDR knew when and where they were going to strike and was therefore responsible for the US losses. Further, FDR had maneuvered the Japanese, most notably by embargoing oil, into striking us so he could take the nation into war against Germany. (Some attached a faint odor of anti-Semitism to the final step.) The theory was a carry-over from the American-firsters. People who hated Roosevelt loved the theory, so the right-wing nuts of the day were prominent.)

Wohlstetter wrote a great book, that won the Bancroft Prize, on Pearl Harbor. Her argument basically was, yes, FDR and Washington had lots of information that predicted Pearl Harbor, but in the day-to-day run of affairs, there was also lots of information predicting an attack on Singapore, or Indochina or the Dutch Indies or.... She pointed out the problem of identifying what's significant from amid the mass of detail that a decision-maker receives each day. It's a caution for those who over-simplify.

Ironically she was the wife of Alfred, who was an early mentor to the neo-cons, who have set a new standard for over-simplification.

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