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(More customer reviews)Most books about Pearl Harbor, from the many volumes of the Congressional Pearl Harbor Hearings to the two-volume study by the late Gordon Prange detail all kinds of intelligence available to the United States that forewarned of the Japanese attack. If you have some background in that history, Stinnett's well-documented book adds new material to the story and discloses a set of Japanese Navy communications intercepts that complement more publicized decoded exchanges among the Japanses diplomatic corps.
The notion that high minded government leaders might conspire to manipulate American public opinion in support of a cause they think important and worth American lives is not as evocative in the post-Vietnam politics than it would have been in 1941.
Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson both managed to entice "enemy" attacks on U.S. forces to rally American public opinion Congressional support. They aren't alone. While damage to the U.S. fleet and personnel at Pearl Harbor far exceeded the couple of bullet holes inflicted on the USS Turner Joy and Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, the pre-event manipulation was not all that different. That people in government might conspire to keep their machinations hidden from the press and public, sadly, isn't novel either anymore. Radiation experiments, commandos known to be captured, but written off as killed and all the rest have taught us almost too much about human nature.
While Stinnett writes bitterly about the impact on lives and careers of competent officers and men caught up in concealing vital intelligence information from Hawaiian-based officers and subsequently threatened and besmirched to maintain secrecy long after the event, even now, when records are still held secret by the DOD in some bizarre interpretation of protecting the National Defense. At the same time, however, Sinnett and any person with a memory and conscience is hard put to accept the possible outcome of world events in the 1940s had the United States stayed outof the European War.
If this is your first Pearl Harbor book you may get lost in the detail and obscurity needed to substantiate the book's argument. Read something else first, but read this one too.
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