Two weeks after its October Surprise cover(up) story, NW offers an interesting contrast in its Pearl Harbor anniversary story. Here another conspiracy theory, equally if not more speculative, is treated very differently. This is the "notion that Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, or the two in concert dragged America into war by suppressing warnings of the attack [on Pearl Harbor]"–which "must be rated among the great American conspiracy theories" (11/25/91:28).
In this case, NW allows a good deal of the evidence to speak for itself. The argument that the British had cracked Japan's military code before Dec. 7 is "convincing," and evidence that warnings were suppressed go unchallenged:
A British double agent acquired Japanese battle plans describing an attack on Pearl Harbor. U.S. experts decoded a Japanese message ordering that individual ship positions in Pearl Harbor be plotted. A Dutch diplomat warned Washington specifically about an impending attack on the base. Finally, U.S. military officials picked up a coded radio broadcast to Japanese worldwide before the attack: Higashi no kazeame (East Wind Rain). It was the "Go" code. Why wasn't it relayed to Hawaii? (p. 28).
An hour and a half before the attack an enemy submarine was spotted and sunk by the U.S. Navy one mile off Pearl Harbor, and a half-hour later a huge radar blip which "had to be a huge flight of planes 137 miles to the north" was reported. No action was taken on either warning (p. 27).
NW even offers a credible analysis of the longer-term effects of the attack:
The shock was galvanic. It forged a superpower. Isolationist and interventionist impulses that had always divided the nation converged in white-hot fury and a war for unconditional surrender. And the after-shock generated a fear of a nuclear sneak attack that shaped American defense theories and budgets right through the cold war (p. 25).
Another "legacy was an obsession with better intelligence that led to the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency" (p. 30).
These are astonishing admissions. It is as if NW is going out of its way to be fair to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists in order to give credibility to its (totally unconvincing) attack on the October Surprise theorists in the previous issue.
Nevertheless, here too the standard conspiracy-bashing premises are clearly discernible on the level of metaphor and innuendo:
1. Conspiracy theorists are "buffs" looking for a gimmick that "sells books" (p. 28).
2. Conspiracy theories are Old News (and therefore insignificant): "Half a century after Pearl Harbor, the question still resonates...by its sheer staying power (p. 28).
3. Conspiracy theories are wild and dangerous. (This contradicts 1. and 2, but we are dealing here with doublethink, not logic.) The Pearl Harbor story is a fire that "sprang to life," was "fed" and then "rekindled" (p. 28).
4. Conspiracy theorists are the true conspirators: "Assemble the evidence one way, and a conspiracy "seems all too plausible" (p. 28). Someone is trying to trick us, to harm us. The arson metaphor has the same implication: the flames of conspiracy theory "were rekindled by recent revelations." The arsonists are not specifically identified, but since the crime has been redefined, by metaphor, as the theory of the crime, the culprits must be the theorists. (Like 3, this contradicts 1 and 2.)
Despite these more or less subliminal (and internally contradictory) messages, on the whole NW is telling us that the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory may well be true. This would mean that FDR sacrificed 2,330 Americans in order to catapult the country into war–a far greater crime, one would think, than keeping 52 Americans imprisoned three months longer than necessary.
Why such different treatment of these two conspiracy theories? It only makes sense if we realize that NW, like the rest of the mass media, is primarily concerned not with truth but with effect. Time digs the memory hole deep. Pearl Harbor is half a century away and FDR is long gone. Even if a tiny fraction of NW readers began to believe that FDR wilfully sacrificed 2,330 Americans, what effect would it have? Who would sound the call for revolution? Who would be thrown out of office?
We can also read in NW that "Hoover's FBI was an American gestapo" (9/30/91:49). Who bats an eye? Hoover, and the presidents who tolerated him, are also long gone. Even Reagan has been gone long enough that his policies in Nicaragua can now be described as "bellicose" (10/21/91:23). That's all Old News.
But Bush was still the incumbent president when this article was written. Could we imagine NW calling his policies in Panama or the Gulf "bellicose"? Can we imagine NW referring to the FBI or the CIA today as anything remotely resembling a "gestapo"? There is no evidence that the purposes and methods of these agencies have changed significantly since Hoover's time, but would NW dare to suggest that an ex-chief of the American gestapo (CIA) was sitting in the oval office? Of course not. All this will appear in Time and Newsweek at the proper time–when it is too late to matter..