Final Report?

To the surprise of nobody the members of the Joint Congressional Committee investigating the debacle at Pearl Harbor divided up just as their questioning of witnesses had indicated they would.

In a final evaluation of the 70-day hearings, the Democratic majority found the military to blame, found no fault in the planning or actions of the Roosevelt Administration. In a minority report Republican Senators Ferguson (Michigan) and Brewster (Maine) blamed Franklin Roosevelt and Secretaries Hull, Stimson and Knox, but necessarily found the military commanders were also slow of head and foot.

Wisconsin's Republican Representative Frank B. Keefe (who signed the majority report along with California's Republican Congressman Bertrand W. Gearhart) took a middle ground in a supplemental opinion. Items: the Democratic majority had tried "to throw as soft a light as possible on the Washington scene"; General George Marshall and Admiral Harold Stark "must bear their full share of responsiblity"; the U.S. people must be better informed of the course of U.S. diplomacy than they were in 1941.

No one took direct exception to the majority's conclusions: 1) that the Japanese were not tricked or provoked into the attack; 2) that Army & Navy commands in Hawaii (headed by Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieut. General Walter Short) were remiss in failing "to effect a state of readiness"; 3) that the Army War Plans Division under Lieut (then Brigadier) General Leonard T. Gerow was lax in failing to prod General Short into greater readiness.

But the disputed ground was the same as it had been when the committee sat down to write its 492-page report: how much was the Administration to blame? With the filing of the report, many a U.S. citizen assumed that the case was now one for the historians. Not yet. This week, Maine's Brewster looked forward to the election of a Republican Congress; one thing he intended to push when that day came: a second Congressional Pearl Harbor investigation.

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