A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER : CHAPTER 5 : Fighting the Good Fight

One day, several years before Pearl Harbor, Gen. Douglas MacArthur rose in fiery outrage before a congressional committee. He demanded an apology or he would walk out.

At issue was toilet paper.

Congress had shown the Army little respect as it pleaded for funds. Now the committee questioned whether MacArthur was requesting too much money for toilet paper. One member of Congress asked him snidely whether he was, perhaps, expecting an outbreak of dysentery.

MacArthur stood in anger. “I have humiliated myself,” he said, his words dripping with contempt. “I have almost licked the boots of some gentlemen to get funds for the motorization and mechanization of the Army. Now, gentlemen, you have insulted me. I am as high in my profession as you are in yours. When you are ready to apologize, I shall be back.”

Before he could walk out, says historian William Manchester, an apology was, indeed, proffered. And, thanks to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was one of the last times any American general ever had to fight for toilet paper. A generation of Americans and their elected officials took from Pearl Harbor a grave lesson--that the United States should maintain a high level of defense and should seek unabashedly to convey its military strength throughout the rest of the world. Nor was that the only lesson. In a number of other ways, Pearl Harbor left a profound legacy for America and its people.

For instance:

* Defense policy. The United States is haunted by the fear of another surprise. This has meant restructuring the military under a single secretary of defense; building a military-industrial complex; stationing American forces at a network of foreign bases that enable them to fight far from home and targeting adversaries with nuclear missiles ready to fire in minutes.

* Foreign policy. No longer is America isolationist, sometimes to its discomfort. Its foreign entanglement in Vietnam, for instance, cost the United States dearly. Some say it renewed isolationist sentiment in America. But this and isolationism kindled by the end of the Cold War are different from the leave-us-alone mentality of post-World War II Fortress America.

* Intelligence. The CIA can thank Pearl Harbor for its existence. America well understood that the Japanese surprise represented an intelligence failure--whether a failure in intelligence gathering or analysis. From this was born the Office of Strategic Services and then the Central Intelligence Agency, charged with preventing nasty surprises.

* Economic policy. While changes in U.S. security policy have endured, changes in economic policy have not. Pearl Harbor prompted America to mobilize its industry. But when the war ended, so did industrial mobilization. The Japanese did not give up their wartime control over their industries. Their economic approach has reversed the U.S.-Japanese trade balance--and an economic contest is on.

American attitudes toward Japan have changed, as well. They sometimes seem to have come full circle. It is noteworthy that never have these views been entirely realistic, much less very well balanced.

In the popular American stereotype of the time, Pearl Harbor turned the Japanese into sneaks: a cruel people who were unscrupulous and who broke the rules of civilized warfare, as if that were not an oxymoron. This American attitude prevailed throughout World War II. But then, as the war ended and the six-year American occupation of Japan began, America’s image of the Japanese changed. At that point, says Edward Seidensticker, a retired professor of Japanese, “Japan . . . was once again what it had been in 1867--the eager student, this time learning about democracy. It was a quick change.”

Indeed, on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the event was viewed as little more than an occasion for nostalgia. “The fury at Japan has subsided,” Newsweek reported at the time. “Bitter enmity long since gave way to cordial alliance.”

But then, in the 1970s, American perceptions of Japan began to change once again. And by the 1990s, some scholars were saying that Pearl Harbor had become a symbol for U.S.-Japanese trade disputes.

These scholars note that reporting this attitude does not mean they endorse it. “For many, the surprise attack remains a symbol of enduring Japanese treachery,” says John Dower, a historian who specializes in Japanese and American affairs. “The little yellow men who sank the Arizona without warning, this bitter refrain goes, have carried on with deceitful strategies to attack Silicon Valley, Detroit and points east. Someday they may actually sink the American ship of state. This is the crudest form in which Americans remember Pearl Harbor. It is a view echoed in high places and (is) premised on an abiding belief that the Japanese are fundamentally fanatic, unscrupulous and unstable.”

DEFENSE POLICY

Pearl Harbor’s most significant legacy to the United States was waking it up to the modern world. As it stirred, America began to engage other nations: sometimes as an ally, other times as an adversary.

For this reason, Pearl Harbor caused irrevocable changes in American defense policy. America resolved, with a rock-hard determination, that it would never again, in any circumstances, be caught unaware. This meant faraway DEW lines (distant early-warning radar) in Alaska; ballistic missiles on land, sea and air; atomic war-fighting codes carried by a military aide who accompanied the commander in chief wherever he went (“the football” or “the button”), and a fail-safe system, to avoid accidental doomsday. At the same time, it meant a hair-trigger that kept nuclear missiles ready to fire in minutes.

It also meant repairing a deficiency that was widely seen as a contributor to the disaster in Hawaii. At the time, the Army and Navy had separate commands; indeed, they were parts of separate departments in the President’s Cabinet. Lack of coordination had made it much easier for the enemy to accomplish maximum destruction. Congress urged that “immediate action be taken to ensure that unity of command is imposed”--not only in Washington but also “at all military and naval outposts.”

During the war, all personnel--Army and Navy--were placed under a theater commander: Gen. MacArthur in the southwestern Pacific theater; Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, in the central Pacific. And, beginning in 1943, everyone reported to a single Department of Defense. Before the war, American military leaders worked in small offices in downtown Washington or even in temporary barracks on the mall. After Pearl Harbor, they crossed the Potomac River and built themselves a Pentagon whose very size, shape and solidity symbolized America’s determination never again to stint on national defense.

Pearl Harbor also meant building a military-industrial complex so enduring that not even the end of the Cold War would spell its demise. “The military-industrial complex that has so profoundly stimulated, and contorted, the contemporary U.S. economy had its genesis there,” says John Dower, the historian. “Over the decades of the Cold War, (the military-industrial complex) drew significant justification for its being from the lessons of Pearl Harbor.”

Apart from its impact on the American economy, this combination of business and defense had a far-reaching effect on individual Americans.

Bette Murphy grew up an Army brat. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she was a nurse in Seattle. “I wanted to do my part,” she says, and being a nurse was not enough. She moved to California and went to work at Douglas, the nation’s first defense plant. It was covered with chicken wire and coated with glue and feathers, she recalls, and its roof was patterned to look like a golf course. Machine-gun nests perched atop the buildings. Air raid sirens would go off without warning at least once a week. Everyone would run down into bomb shelters, where they would wait in the dark for an all-clear.

“I wanted to work on the airplanes,” she says. She was in her 20s at the time. “They said, ‘Well, we’ll hire you as a riveter.’ ”

Bette Murphy, who is 72 now, says women far outnumbered the men at the plant. At peak production, she figures, about 60,000 women worked at Douglas. “I had never ever had a hammer in my hand. I never had even nailed a thing together or anything. And I said, ‘OK.’ And they said, ‘All right, you’re going to tie your hair up, and no jewelry. And you have to wear coveralls.’ You couldn’t have any hair showing at all because it would catch in the drills. We had one girl scalped. . . . It was pretty bad.”

For 60 cents an hour, Bette Murphy drilled holes and riveted pieces of metal together. The big project was the B-17, called the Flying Fortress because it was huge, carried bombs and was mounted with guns in its sides, nose and tail.

“Walking up beside this great big B-17, and realizing that we were going to work on this great big aircraft, you know, that responsibility was just overwhelming. . . .They taught me how, right there on the airplane. They said, ‘Now Bette, you go up here, and you take this drill motor, and you chuck it up, you know, and you drill a hole up here, and you be very careful.’

“We turned out a B-17 every seven hours.”

Finally, Pearl Harbor led American military planners to devise a strategy called “forward deployment.” As early as the fall of 1945, U.S. policy-makers and military leaders reached a consensus on the need to create a postwar system of bases overseas that would enable the United States to fight far from home. “The defense of a nation, if it is to be effective, must begin beyond its frontiers,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in March of 1946. And America has maintained this strategy ever since.

FOREIGN POLICY

As the first enemy attack on American soil since the War of 1812, the bombing of Pearl Harbor swept away traditional isolationism--and ended a foreign policy debate going all the way back to George Washington, who warned in his Farewell Address that America should avoid “entangling alliances.”

Was that smart--or even possible?

Pearl Harbor showed beyond any doubt that the answer to the latter, at least, was no. And ever since, the United States has assumed for itself an internationalist role in the world--seeking out, rather than shrinking from, the “entangling alliances” the first president was talking about.

“(For) well over 150 years, the United States was secure behind the protection of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (and the British fleet),” says William G. Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. “But Pearl Harbor destroyed the illusion that America could somehow remain safe while ignoring distant threats to the peace in Europe and Asia.”

Pat Choate, an economist who has written about U.S.-Japan relations, sees it similarly--but adds a warning about today’s economic challenge from Japan.

“The significance of Pearl Harbor is that it broke America out of its parochialism . . . ,” Choate says. “Pearl Harbor took all the America-firsters, the (Charles) Lindberghs, and it swept them off the map of intellectual debate. The United States realized it had to provide a leadership role commensurate with its resources--and we have, for 50 years. But while we could do that for a security threat, we have not yet done that for an economic threat. We haven’t had the sophistication to realize how important economics is to security.”

Not that internationalism has been easy. It has thrust the United States into a plethora of foreign entanglements--some of which have gotten it into trouble. The Vietnam War was an example. At its heart was the assumption that denying Vietnam to Communist rule was crucial to demonstrating America’s credibility as a world leader. If the United States lost in Vietnam, how would other nations, especially Communist adversaries, perceive America’s ability to protect its vital interests around the globe?

As it turned out, when America lost in Vietnam, its credibility was hardly the most significant casualty. To be sure, the defeat shrank America’s posture. It unsettled its allies. And it created a palpable distrust of the United States in the Third World. But more than that, the Vietnam War cost at least 58,000 American lives. It divided the United States like nothing since the Civil War. It sent the American economy into exhausted prostration. Some say it was a proximate cause of the constitutional crisis called Watergate. It cost America its post-World War II foreign policy consensus on the necessity to contain communism. And some argue that Vietnam rekindled isolationism in America.

Others say the end of the Cold War is having the same effect--that it is causing some Americans to seek retrenchment from the internationalism that has marked America’s global attitude ever since World War II.

It is worth recognizing, however, that these versions of isolationism are different from the kind that lulled America to sleep before Pearl Harbor. Until then, isolationism was based on the assumption that the United States should be protected from the world; that America was so new, different and pure that it would inevitably be corrupted by foreign influences, such as the British or French. During Vietnam, by contrast, what might be called neo-isolationism was based on just the opposite assumption: that the rest of the world should be protected from the United States--that America, by intention or not, would corrupt Third World countries like Vietnam.

Today, with the Cold War at an end, pundits such as Patrick Buchanan, a White House speech writer for Nixon and Reagan, are voicing what might be called “neo-neo-isolationism.” This is different, as well, since it holds that the United States should not be involved in the rest of the world because the cost in money and commitments will jeopardize efforts to revitalize America itself.

Neither of these new forms of isolationism is based on the belief, dating back to the days of the Pilgrims, that--having escaped the evils and persecutions of the Old World--the United States should be left alone. Because of Pearl Harbor, that traditional isolationism--the leave-us-alone mentality of Fortress America--is gone, perhaps forever.

INTELLIGENCE

More than any other event, Pearl Harbor is responsible for the existence of the CIA.

Few things in history have given the United States as much discomfort as the fact that Japan was able to plan a sneak attack on a major U.S. military installation, practice it and execute it with utter and complete surprise.

In one of the best-known studies of American intelligence before Pearl Harbor, Roberta Wohlstetter argues that there was enough information available for the United States to have been able to predict an attack. America was taken by surprise, she says, because of failures in the analysis and processing of the information. “We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor,” she argues, “not for want of the relevant materials but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones.”

David Kahn, on the other hand, who has written authoritatively about intelligence and encryption, takes the opposite view.

“The intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor was one not of analysis,” he says, “but of collection.” The Japanese accomplished complete surprise, he says, because no specific “reference to a raid on Pearl Harbor ever went on the air, even coded. . . . Not one intercept, not one datum of intelligence ever said a thing about an attack on Pearl Harbor. . . .”

It might have been possible to have foreseen Pearl Harbor, Kahn says in Foreign Affairs magazine, “if the United States, years before, had insinuated spies into high-level Japanese military and naval circles, flown regular aerial reconnaissance of the Japanese navy, put intercept units aboard ships sailing close to Japan to pick up naval messages that a greatly expanded code-breaking unit might have cracked or recruited a network of marine observers to report on ship movements.”

In any case, it was clear after Pearl Harbor that the United States needed a modern intelligence apparatus run by a central director of intelligence gathering and analysis. There was, in fact, an early attempt to establish just such a thing.

Five months before Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the post of Coordinator of Information, Kahn says, “with authority to collect and analyze all information and data, which may bear upon national security . . . and to make such information and data available to the President.” The effort was too little and too late to make any difference that December. And then, the following June, Roosevelt undid whatever independence and central coordination the post might have offered. He turned the Coordinator of Information into the Office of Strategic Services and gave the agency to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally, after the war, President Harry S. Truman abolished the OSS.

At the same time, however, Truman ordered that planning begin for “a comprehensive and coordinated foreign intelligence program for all federal agencies concerned with that type of activity.” And a year later, Truman asked Congress to establish the Central Intelligence Agency. It would coordinate the work of all other intelligence agencies in government, both military and civilian. And it would be run by a director of central intelligence.

“One reason the Congress created the position in 1947,” says Stansfield Turner, who was director of central intelligence under President Jimmy Carter, “was to avoid the mistakes made just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor, when the Army, Navy and State Department intelligence bureaus were not fully sharing the clues each had about Japanese intentions.”

Not long after its creation, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies shifted their focus to the Soviet Union and to other Communist-controlled nations. But Pearl Harbor had a continuing effect. It meant that a surprise attack was always one of the prime concerns of American intelligence throughout the Cold War.

ECONOMIC POLICY

If America’s foreign policy, defense policy and intelligence needs were forever altered by Pearl Harbor, the same cannot be said of its economic policy.

Thrust into World War II, the federal government mounted a massive patriotic mobilization of industry. Some companies engaged directly in defense production and became a permanent part of what was subsequently called the military-industrial complex. But many others helped the nation out--and then eagerly returned to their private peacetime work.

Washington had absolutely no desire to run America’s peacetime economy, and few people thought that it should. Happily and without any misgivings, the nation returned to its natural instincts, which were much more inclined toward laissez - faire.

Pat Choate, the economist, says the motivation was quite simple. “People just wanted to go back to their lives.” The same was not true, however, across the Pacific. “Ironically,” Choate notes, “the Japanese went on a war footing, and they never quit. And we did. Imagine if America had been on a war footing for the past 50 years. The Japanese economy wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

During the war, some American industries, at the prodding of the War Department, applied some of the new ideas of quality control being taught by Edwards Deming and his mentor, Walter Shewhart, a physicist at Bell Laboratories. But after the fighting stopped, Deming was frustrated to find that U.S. companies--without any more prodding from Washington--paid little attention to him or his ideas.

It was as if--economically, at least--America had gone back to sleep. Surely it seemed that way to Shotaro Kamiya when he got off a plane on June 24, 1950, at Los Angeles International Airport. Kamiya had a single mission in mind. He was the president of a small, struggling truck manufacturer back in Japan, called the Toyota Motor Sales Co. Business was so bad that Toyota was producing only 300 trucks a month--and had a growing number sitting unsold on its lots. Kamiya was desperate to save his company, and he had in mind negotiating some sort of tie-up with the Ford Motor Co. Officials at Ford did not like the idea. As Kamiya later recalled to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, the Ford executives told him they doubted that Toyota could ever have much success selling its products in the United States.

Kamiya spent his first two months in America engaged in difficult and depressing negotiations--trying, without any luck, to land a deal that could turn things around for Toyota. As it happened, however, on the day of his arrival at LAX, the Korean War had broken out. And by the time Kamiya went back home to Japan, the U.S. Department of Defense was placing what would become a flood of orders with Toyota for its trucks. Soon, Kamiya and his company were selling 1,500 trucks a month to the Americans.

Those American purchases were “Toyota’s salvation,” Kamiya later told Japanese journalists. He admitted feeling guilty that “I was rejoicing over another country’s war.” But profits from those Korean War orders enabled Toyota to start building passenger cars, and the rest is history.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, virtually no one in America could envision Japan as an economic competitor. Japan was seen as a beggar, an impoverished and needy nation with few natural resources or other assets. Americans thought Japanese products were junk.

“War and occupation,” reported Business Week magazine in 1949, “have not changed Japan’s traditional tendency to dump poor-quality products on world markets.” Ten years after Pearl Harbor, in 1951, Fortune magazine published an article that asked, “Can Japan Pay Her Own Way?” As late as 1955, the CIA prepared an intelligence estimate that predicted that Japan would remain an economic pygmy for at least another decade.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles haughtily told Japanese Foreign Minister Memoru Shigemitsu that Japan’s trade deficit with the United States would be a permanent fact of life. Japan did what it could to support American containment of communism, and the United States rewarded it with financial aid, open markets, special procurement for Japanese products and access to American technology. “In the Cold War context,” says historian John Dower, (the Japanese) quickly became a favored client of the United States.”

But something was going on. Americans paid little heed, at first; but things were changing. One of the earliest indications came in 1951 at a Japanese trade fair in Seattle. Business Week reported that several Japanese products were on display and noted that “some items--like cameras, binoculars, sewing machines--were felt to be right up to U.S. standards.” By 1966, the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were well on their way to economic parity with the United States in a number of key areas. The Japanese press labeled the year 1966 maika gannen --the first year of the era of “my car.” For the first time, the number of cars produced in Japan exceeded 10 million. To the Japanese this meant that many could now own their own cars. It also meant that Japan was beginning to make inroads into the American auto market. In that year, Nissan’s Datsun climbed to sixth among all cars imported into America. With 22,000 cars sold, it was still well behind Volkswagen, which sold 307,000. But within three years, Datsun sales in the United States nearly tripled. And Toyota sales rose even more rapidly. By 1975, Shotaro Kamiya’s little truck company sold 283,000 passenger cars to Americans; Volkswagen sold only 268,000. Toyotas were now the No. 1 imported cars in the United States. And Datsuns were a close third.

Over all, in the 11 years since John Foster Dulles’ haughty remark, Japan had ended its trade deficit with the United States and started running a trade surplus. By the end of the 1960s, the United States and Japan were embroiled in their first serious trade dispute. As part of his effort to win Southern votes, Richard Nixon pledged during his 1968 campaign to curb the import of Japanese textiles. And from 1969 through 1971, the Nixon Administration sparred with Japan over its textile trade. Nixon threatened quotas, and Japan finally went along with voluntary restraint on its exports. “The textile feud,” says Shinichi Kitaoka, a Japanese historian, “marked the beginning of a shift in U.S.-Japanese relations from protection and obedience to competition and confrontation.”

Because the United States, unlike Japan, ultimately let its postwar industries slip, it is in the midst today of what Lee Iacocca, chairman of Chrysler Corp., calls “another major war with Japan.” It is not a shooting war, Iacocca says, “and I guess we should be thankful for that. The current conflict is a trade war. But because our government refuses to see this war for what it really is, we’re well on the road to defeat.”

Some scholars, however, do not think that more government trade barriers are the answer. Economist Murray L. Weidenbaum, for instance, has this reply to Iacocca: “The challenge is to meet foreign competition. The fact is that the American automobile industry has become a lot more productive as a result of meeting the Japanese competition. Cars are made better in the United States than they used to be. As consumers, we benefited.”

Other scholars, like Pat Choate, would like to see the government do more to curb the Japanese. “We haven’t had the sophistication to realize how important economics is to security . . . ,” Choate says. “They (the Japanese) have challenged our assumptions about ourselves twice--back then, our geopolitical assumptions, now our economic assumptions about free trade. . . . The Japanese forced us to give up isolationism, and now they’re forcing us to give up our monomaniacal obsession with free trade.”

REFLECTIONS

America seems less certain than Japan about its goals.

The leaders of Japan say their nation seeks one thing: dignity. Period. New Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa defines this as “an honored place in the international community.”

On the other hand, President Bush grapples with what he calls the “vision thing”--a difficulty he has articulating his dreams. He told the United Nations not long ago: “We seek a Pax Universalis built upon shared responsibilities and aspirations.” To many, this sounded like collective security. On other occasions--in his State of the Union address to Congress this year, for instance--Bush said that America wants a “new world order.” In that instance, he was explaining why he thinks the burden of world leadership must fall to the United States. To some conservatives--Pat Buchanan, for example, and Irving Kristol, a co-editor at the Public Interest magazine--whatever it is that Bush is saying sounds like Wilsonian nonsense. At the United Nations, they hear the President say: “Let me assure you, the United States will remain engaged. We will not retreat and pull back into isolationism”--and it makes them shudder.

While nobody wants to see another tussle over the Army’s budget for toilet paper, Americans of the Buchanan/Kristol persuasion urge greater indifference to the fate of foreign nations and greater attention to the costly needs of the United States.

To some liberals, on the other hand, it is this greater indifference to foreign concerns that is the definition of nonsense, whether it is the indifference of the old, vanished variety of isolationism or that of today’s neo-neo-isolationists.

“Liberals were never isolationists,” says pundit Michael Kinsley. In the face of foreign conflicts, he says, liberal objections have not been to foreign entanglements per se, but to bloodshed and war. “By contrast, the new conservative isolationism seems to revel in bloodshed but resent the entanglements. Just when the world seems really ready for some of the gooier aspects of internationalism--global environmental cooperation, free-trade zones, etc.--these guys want to hole up.”

Amid these arguments, it is informative to listen to what another President says--the one who was in office when America was so rudely awakened on Dec. 7, 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt called isolationism a delusion. He likened it to an island that some think is a dream but that is, in reality, a nightmare.

“Let us not forget,” Franklin Roosevelt said just before he died in 1945, “that isolationism a quarter of a century ago was started not by a direct attack against international cooperation but against the alleged imperfections of the peace.”

Roosevelt added: “Perfectionism, no less than isolationism or imperialism or power politics, may obstruct the paths to international peace.”

A Note on Language

For reasons of historical accuracy, the term Japs appears in this special section of World Report, even though it has long been The Times’ policy to avoid such pejorative racial terms.