Thirteen days book review by Robert F. Kennedy5-page essay for more information look at the attached files

William March’s Company K

( Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama press,1989)

A review by Merga Gemeda

History 152

American History Survey II

Professor Steven J. Bucklin

Department of History

The University of South Dakota

26 February 2019

Jane Doe is a respected historian of American Foreign Relations. She earned a

Bachelor’s degree in History at Loras College, a master’s degree at the University of South Dakota, and a doctorate in International Relations at Harvard in 1970. Currently, she is a full professor at Yale where she teaches courses on international relations, American foreign policy, and genocide studies.1

In addition to company k, william has written a text book titled The

Drama Unfolds: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Norton,

1999), as well as numerous articles published in such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs, Diplomatic History, The Journal of American History, and The American Historical Review. Doe received the Bancroft Prize from the American Historical Association for Stranger than Fiction. She has also received numerous grants, including a Fellowship at Princeton's Center for International Studies and a National Endowment for the Humanities.2

The subject of Stranger than Fiction is the claim that Franklin Roosevelt had knowledge prior to 7 December 1941 that the Japanese government planned to attack Pearl Harbor. Examining the claims of scholars D. F. Duck and Michael Mouse, Doe's thesis is that Roosevelt did not have specific knowledge of an impending attack on Pearl Harbor and critics who claim otherwise base their interpretation on faulty evidence.3 Their claims, she declares, are "ahistoric and more suitable to cartoon history than legitimate revisionism."4 Doe's purpose in writing the book is to set the record straight and demonstrate that President Roosevelt was not, at least in this instance, a scheming character from Machiavelli's The Prince.

After examining Duck's and Mouse's evidence, Doe provides extensive

evidence of her own. She has visited the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, the Imperial War Museum in Tokyo, the Imperial War Museum in London, and has mined the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and College Park, Maryland. Doe has also combed the records and correspondence of Roosevelt's key advisors, including Harry Hopkins, George C. Marshall, and a host of others. Her primary sources are impeccable.

Doe also provides a lesson from the exemplary secondary literature that has been written about this subject. She cites, among other works, He Was Not A Liar by Richard Nixon; FDR Was Not Asleep, by Ronald Reagan, and "Read My Lips": FDR and the Attack on Pearl Harbor by George H. W. Bush. 

From this exhaustive evidence, Doe concludes that at the most, FDR and the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew that a Japanese attack might come somewhere in the Pacific. Given that the closest American outposts to Japan were the Philippines and Midway Island, it seemed most logical that if an attack came, it would concentrate on those two island groups. Hawaii was thought to be too far away from Japan for an invasion or attack force to be successfully launched. American detection and subsequent destruction of such a force was virtually assured.5

Doe also confronts the issue of the Magic Intercepts. Indeed, the United States intelligence services had decoded Japan's diplomatic code, but not its military code. U.S. leaders knew something was up, but they did not know exactly what was going to happen because the diplomatic messages were incomplete and non-specific. Doe includes translations of the specific messages that were intercepted so that the reader can make his own conclusions as to what the principle architects of American policy knew in late November, early December 1941.6

The majority of reviewers have reacted favorably to Doe's book. Charles Chaplin observed in Foreign Affairs that "I can think of no other treatment of this subject in modern times that has done so much to repudiate the poor scholarship of the revisionists."7 Mel Brooks wrote in Diplomatic History that the book "blazes a new path of scholarship, although the author must be dead in the saddle after her intensive review of the evidence."8 In an interesting twist, Alfred Hitchcock asserted that Doe has added a new dimension to the profile of revisionists: "Those small minded scholars are better suited to running a motel," declared the English reviewer, "than to writing history!"9

There were some reviews whose authors clung to the notion of a vast FDR-led conspiracy to bring the United States into the war. One reviewer even claimed that FDR was the dupe of Winston Churchill. These reviews appeared in Conspiracy Journal, the Journal of Modern Conspiracies, and Marxism Lives! It may be that the nature of these journals alone speaks to the quality of the reviews they publish. The consensus of credible reviewers is that Stranger than Fiction is the standard by which future books on this subject will be judged.

Stranger than Fiction is a compellingly written narrative political history. Her

style is engaging despite the fact that she must deal with occasionally dry material. Nonetheless, the intrigue of the last half of 1941 rivets the reader. Doe brings the issues and the actors alive. Rather than write "Roosevelt was worried about developments in Japan," Doe reaches into the memoirs of the people around FDR so that she can tell the reader: "Roosevelt was smoking more. Pack after crumpled pack of Chesterfields littered the office. His trumpeting smile was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he wore the burden of office like so many creases on an aging leather satchel."10

Jane Doe demonstrates that history does not have to be just names, dates, and places. It can be engaging and compelling as well as informative.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Doe, Jane. Stranger than Fiction. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1999.

Reviews

Brooks, Mel. “Review of Stranger than Fiction,” by Jane Doe. Diplomatic History vol. 2,

#2, (Spring 2000): 14-15.

Chaplin, Charles. “Review of Stranger than Fiction,” by Jane Doe. Foreign Affairs vol.

1, #4 (Winter 2000): 2-3.

Hitchcock, Alfred. “Review of Stranger than Fiction,” by Jane Doe. American

Historical Review vol. 3, #3 (Summer 2000): 10-11.

Marx, Karl Jr. “Review of Stranger than Fiction,” by Jane Doe. Marxism Lives! vol. 4,

#1 (Fall 2000): 12-13.

Stone, Oliver. “Review of Stranger than Fiction,” by Jane Doe. Conspiracy Journal vol.

4, #1 (Fall 2000): 15-16.

Ziphead, Mark. “Review of Stranger than Fiction,” by Jane Doe. Journal of Modern

Conspiracies vol. 3, #3 (Summer 2000): 21-22.