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Roosevelt’s summer embargo was the culmination of another very clever administration policy, namely helping the Japanese to build up their military oil reserves just enough to encourage them to attack the United States but not enough to enable them to win a long war. In the summer of 1940, Roosevelt took two actions designed to implement this truly Machiavellian plan. First, he signed a bill authorizing a massive American naval build up designed to create a two-ocean navy. Second, he required American companies to obtain a government license before selling any petroleum products or scrap metal to Japan. For the next 12 months, the administration readily granted export permits to American firms selling raw materials to Japan, and Japanese oil tankers and merchant vessels could be seen loading up on scrap iron and petroleum at America’s West Coast ports. Meanwhile, American naval intelligence, using radio direction finding (RDF), tracked the tankers to the Japanese naval oil depot at Tokuyama. Roosevelt’s strategists calculated that helping the Japanese build up a two-year supply of reserves would be about right. That way, if war broke out in the second half of 1941, the Japanese would run out of oil in mid to late 1943, just as American wartime industrial production would be peaking and her massive carrier fleets (100 proposed carriers) would be ready to go on the offensive. In July 1941, Roosevelt took the final step and, together with the British and Dutch, imposed an embargo on the sale of petroleum, iron, and steel to Japan (McCollum’s Action H). The trap had now been laid, and the Japanese were not slow to fall for it.

Stinnett does not ignore the moral dimensions of the Roosevelt strategy. How did those who knew the attack was coming justify the deliberate sacrifice of over three thousand American lives? A bone-chilling comment by Lt. Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, commander of Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor, provides the answer. In a postwar assessment of the attack made to a naval historian, he remarked of Pearl Harbor that "it was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country." There you have it. Massive deception, lying, the sacrifice of military careers, the betrayal of friends and fellow officers, and the deaths of thousands of American servicemen – all is justified for the cause of inciting a peaceful people to go to war. Stinnett himself is far from being unsympathetic to Roosevelt’s strategy. He agrees with the pre-war interventionists that America needed to go to war against the Axis powers. According to Stinnett, Roosevelt and his advisers "faced a terrible dilemma." The public was overwhelmingly opposed to entering the war, and in a democracy the people are supposed to rule. Yet, Roosevelt believed this war would be both necessary and just. What to do? In the end, they decided that "something had to be endured in order to stop a greater evil."

Here we have yet another example of Americans making use of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. Americans are quick to deny the ethical legitimacy of this doctrine when it is presented to them as a naked proposition, yet there is no doctrine that they more readily turn to in order to justify morally questionable practices. Do not those who defend the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki argue as their first line of defense that it was morally justified because it saved American lives? And can we not expect to hear in the near future from those who can no longer deny the truth, "Roosevelt’s duplicity was justified because it was necessary to stop Hitler." The Christian’s response to this question was articulated by Paul two thousand years ago: "And why not say, ‘Let us do evil that good may come’? – as we are slanderously reported and as some affirm that we say. Their condemnation is just." (Romans 3:8 NKJV).

We owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Stinnett. Not only has he uncovered the truth behind Pearl Harbor, but in so doing he has exposed one of the greatest cover stories, or con jobs, of all time – American prewar naval intelligence and high command as keystone cop. After sixty years, America’s brave band of revisionist historians have been vindicated, while her servile crop of court historians have been pretty much disgraced.