In Hindsight, Warnings Are Clear

What did the president know, and when did he know it? That was the question asked of Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate investigation three decades ago--and it’s going to be heard a lot in the days, months and years to come, as the Sept. 11 investigations multiply in the wake of the latest revelation that George W. Bush knew more than he first let on.

Then, as now, a Republican chief executive faces questioning from skeptical Democrats in Congress. But one difference is that the media, now extended to cable news and the Internet, are so much more omnipresent, so much more capable of firing up a firestorm. The cliche of contemporary journalism is that the baby-boomerish reporters who dominate the field, always seeking to regain the idealistic iconoclasm of their lost youth, are forever searching for the next Watergate, or the next Vietnam. That is, they yearn for either a domestic cover-up to uncover or a foreign war to debunk. For some, Sept. 11 is both.

Yet while the parallels to the events of the 1960s and 1970s might be strong, the parallels to Pearl Harbor are even stronger.

Immediately after Dec. 7, 1941, some suspected that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance about the Japanese attack, but the censorship and self-censorship of World War II kept a lid on criticizing and inquiring. That lid came off when the war ended.

The first public hearings were opened Nov. 15, 1945, by the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack. The bipartisan panel received testimony from 43 witnesses, examined 183 exhibits and generated 15,000 pages of documentation. Its final report, issued July 16, 1946, found that contrary to some claims, no genuine message was received either by the War Department or the Navy Department; the military was then, oddly enough, divided into a War Department overseeing the Army and a Navy Department overseeing the Navy and Marines. And so FDR, the committee concluded, could not have been complicit in the death of 2,300 Americans.

Instead, it issued 11 recommendations aimed at the structural failures it found, especially the rivalry between the Army’s War Plans Division and the Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence. As the final report noted, “Personal or official jealousy will wreck any organization.”

As a partial result of the lessons learned from Pearl Harbor, the White House and Congress worked together to enact the National Security Act of 1947, which consolidated War and Navy into a single Department of Defense. The same legislation created the Central Intelligence Agency, empowered to coordinate all foreign intelligence gathering.

These bureaucratic reforms worked well enough to win the Cold War, and yet they hardly put to rest historical revisionism about Pearl Harbor. Since then, as more documents have been declassified, books both attacking and defending Roosevelt have poured forth. Congress too has stayed in the game; its last look into Pearl Harbor wrapped up in 1995.

But the definitive work on Dec. 7 argues that yes, indeed, some Americans knew that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor. But we also knew that they were going to bomb the Panama Canal and the Philippines and other points around the Pacific.

In “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision” (1962), Roberta Wohlstetter used the word “static” to describe the dull roar of complementary and contradictory information, such that nobody could reasonably have known what the Japanese had in mind.

Static. That’s the word to bear in mind as the Sept. 11 investigations fly forth, on and off Capitol Hill. And the sound will grow louder in the multimedia mixer as the farrago of facts and factoids echoes from here to cyberspace eternity. In the din, it will be easy for some conspiracists to connect selected data-dots and so “prove” that Bush, or Karl Rove, or Enron, knew that Sept. 11 was coming. But the fair-minded will see that such retrospective blaming is easy. What’s hard is threat-assessing.

And so while it’s likely that Bush will be tarnished by the investigating and scooping to come, it’s hard to believe he’ll be revealed as treacherous.

And in the meantime, all the president has to do is fend off the critics and the crazies, implement necessary reforms--and try to listen through all the static for warning signs of the next attack.