Douglas Horne, author of the two-volume Deception, Intrigue, and the Road to War, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss FDR’s foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Douglas P. Horne grew up in a military family—his father was in the Marine Corps—and graduated cum laude from The Ohio State University with a B.A. in History in 1974. He spent 20 years working for the U.S. Navy in various capacities: 10 years on active duty as a Surface Warfare Officer and 10 more years as a Navy civil servant. Doug spent over 14 years of his Navy service in Hawaii: he served on three U.S. Navy destroyers homeported in Pearl Harbor from 1976-1981, and was the Operations Manager in a Navy field office in Pearl Harbor, from 1985-1995.
Doug opted for a major career shift when he relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1995 to assume a position on the staff of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB); as head of the Military Records Team on the ARRB, Doug oversaw the release of significant historical documents related to U.S. policy on Cuba and Vietnam during the Kennedy years, and he was the principal research assistant for the ARRB General Counsel during the Review Board’s crucial depositions of ten (10) key JFK autopsy witnesses.
Mr. Horne retired from Federal Service in 2016, after working at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for 2 years, and after completing his civil service career by working with the U.S. State Department’s passport division for the final 14 years of his 40-year Federal career.
Doug is the author of three books:
(1) The five-volume Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, about the U.S. government’s cover-up of the medical evidence in the JFK assassination;
(2) The e-book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy was Assassinated; and
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Does Mr Horne have an email contact?
I have some queries on his volumes about JFK.
regards
Mr. Horne does have an email, however he is not discussing JFK-related work at this time and remains a very private person. Thank you.
PEARL HARBOUR ATTACK WAS ON MY 4TH BIRTHDAY.FOR YEARS I’VE QUESTIONED HOW THOSE JAPS SAILED FOR DAYS AND WERE NEVER INTERCEPTED.TO START WAR.I BELIEVE IT WAS ALL ALLOWED TO HAPPEN.
It’s almost a moot point whether FDR knew the time and location of the attack. The real crime (and it was a crime) was provoking an attack. And once again, we get the apology, “He had to do it”. If FDR really “had to do it”, why even investigate the event. I wish these apologists would point out that the American people were isolationists in the 1930s because they were not isolationists in 1917 or that the Council on Foreign Relations sponsored War and Peace Studies Group was writing the script 2 years before Pearl Harbor.
How anyone could say the the Nazis were worse than the Soviets is puzzling to say the least.
The fact that Mr. Horne was employed at the US Holocaust Memorial raises an eyebrow.
I have never had any doubts about the credibility of Mr. Horne’s character and still do not. While he treats FDR more admirably than I would, historically, he still nails down the “FDR had prior knowledge” argument in his two-volume set. It remains THE work on the subject and it deserves all of the praise it receives. I do believe provoking Japan was a criminal and highly unethical act. I agree with you there. And I do believe the Stalin versus Hitler argument is an odd one, but I also believe it leads nowhere. That said, I think this episode is a very strong one, and I thank you for listening. — S.T.
I agree that Doug Horne has done good work on this issue (as well as the Z-film and JFK autopsy).
This is Doug Horne’s reply to the Dec 16, 2018 guest comment:
I don’t believe I have ever directly stated that Hitler was worse than Stalin, or made any direct comparison of one vs. the other. Both dictators were monsters who had a disregard for human rights and human lives. I do believe Hitler was more dangerous than Stalin, since Nazi Germany was intent on a war of revenge, which quickly morphed into a war for empire and domination of the entire European-Asian land mass. Stalin, arguably, had no such intentions; he built up the Red Army in the 1930s because he was paranoid about Capitalist encirclement, and was afraid of attack by Japan, Germany, and even Poland—but I know of no direct evidence he ever planned on launching an aggressive war to take over Europe during the 1930s, or even in 1941. Since Hitler and Nazi Germany were the aggressors who launched the planet into World War II, and since Hitler’s German armies were close to landing a knockout blow on the USSR in the summer of 1941 and thus gaining a pre-eminent geo-strategic position which would have been extremely difficult to challenge, FDR initiated the oil embargo against Japan to ensure that Japan would expand southwards (to obtain the oil it needed) instead of moving north and attacking its traditional enemy, Russia. FDR feared—rightly so—that a Japanese full-scale attack on Siberia might have knocked the USSR out of the war. The oil embargo which began at the end of July 1941 prevented the Japanese from going north, and helped keep the USSR in the war, since Stalin was then able to transfer 1.5 million troops westward for the defense of Moscow in October of 1941. This is my “realpolitik” view of why FDR froze Japanese assets and allowed his bureaucrats to quietly implement an oil embargo on Japan. If Hitler had defeated the USSR and absorbed its territory and resources, Germany would have been in an unassailable position—Hitler would have won World War II, with the United States sidelined to an impotent position as a mere geo-political observer. FDR also knew that Japanese southern expansion would inevitably, at some point, involve a clash with the United States, but in Roosevelt’s view the imperative to prevent a Russian collapse in the war against Hitler was much more urgent than an inevitable clash with imperial, expansionist Japan, down the road.
I have tried to explain what was really going on in the world in 1941 and why FDR did what he did. Each student of the subject will inevitably make his own moral judgments about FDR’s actions, but before doing so, each person should pay appropriate attention to the facts, and to the context in which FDR’s decisions were made. My recent article in the Deep Truth Journal inaugural issue, as a separate matter, explains why FDR allowed the Pearl Harbor attack to take place once he found out about it in late November of 1941. Essentially, the reason was because 80% of the American people did not want to fight Nazi Germany, and FDR felt it was imperative to do so, because he knew the USSR and Great Britain could not defeat Germany without U.S. help on the battlefield. As my article titled “August 1941” reveals in DTJ, FDR had known since August 1941 (due to diplomatic codebreaking) that Hitler would make war, and declare war, on the United States if the U.S. and Japan entered a state of hostilities. So anyone’s moral evaluation of FDR must take into account the reason for him allowing Yamamoto’s attack on Pearl Harbor to take place: did the greater goal [the defeat of Nazi Germany, with the assistance of a united America solidly behind the war effort] justify passively allowing the first Japanese expansionist blow to fall on American forces? None of FDR’s decisions occurred in a vacuum. If the United States had remained a pacifist nation in 1941 and had stayed out of World War II, we would have had to fight a much more powerful Nazi Empire a generation later, or else knuckle under to the new, dominant Nazi regime in a position of abject subservience. Critics of FDR’s actions vis-a-vis Pearl harbor should think about THAT.
For Douglas P Horne:
Douglas, your profound knowledge and astute analyses of the JFK coup d’etat are, in my opinion, compellingly persuasive – I am in awe of you and your work in revealing so much of what really went on in the JFK assassination and cover-up. Most impressive is you reliance on corroboration and an evidence-based approach, and your ability to find out WHY things happened the way the did. On top of all that, your lucidity and eloquence in front of a camera is a talent not many researchers possess. Well done, Sir.
Ditto on that, Mr Steve!
What can I say, except to deliver a grateful “Thank You!” Clarity in use of the spoken and written English language is very important to me; and corroboration of one set of facts with other facts is essential in determining how much weight to give to any evidence.
Thanks for the reply, Douglas. I am an Editor-Publisher living in New Zealand.. and .have been fascinated by the JFK tragedy for decades (though too young to understand its importance when it happened! I was only six.). I am glad you are still researching and writing about the subject. Keep up the good work.
My admiration and respect for Mr. Horne only increases as I spend more time in review of this research, analysis and presentation. Incredible work!
THANKS!
While this is many months after the last response, I wanted to thank Mr. Horne for his time, knowledge, and willingness to respond to the comments made by previous people. What I wonder however is why he believes we were destined to fight Nazi Germany or Japan given that they succeeded in their war aims of the oil fields of the Caucus and Dutch East Indies. It may sound naive to believe that either country would ever have enough, but both China and Russia would have taken generations to completely.subjugate and none of the concern of Americans to defend. Would it be an American century? Probably not, but being “#1” has hardly benefited the people not in positions of power or directly connected to said people. Labor and power are still enormously unbalanced, even more so than prewar. Credit has caused many to become debt slaves living one pay check away from losing everything. Drugs afflict large swathes of the population and education is laughable.
Nuclear weapons could still have been developed in a timeline where we didnt engage Germany and Japan and suredly MAD would have been employed if the Germans or Japanese developed these technologies as opposed to the USSR in our timeline, but we wouldnt be beholden to being world police or endless middle eastern wars.
Ditto on that, Mr Steve! This was a GREAT episode., S.T. Thank you!
I could listen to Doug Horne all day regarding FDR/War with Japan and the JFK assassination. I’ve read all 5 volumes of Inside the ARRB and Road to War, both volumes several times. Footnoted, documented well researched.
For anyone listening to this program, on July 28, 2021 Mr Horne has posted a very interesting, relevant document on his blog:
My New Book About FDR and Pearl Harbor Now for Sale: “The McCollum Memorandum”
Using the “Purple” machine invented by American cryptographers, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park decrypted and translated this cable on August 23, 1941 and sent it immediately to Churchill. In that cable was the crucial information that Hitler had promised one of his confidants: namely, that he would make war on America if the U.S. and Japan ever became engaged in hostilities.
Note this message sent by the Japanese ambassador in Berlin supports the thesis that FDR wanted to enter the war primarily to help defeat Hitler, because it strongly suggests that goading the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor would cause Germany to declare war on the US — this cable was sent to FDR by the British, so he was aware of German intentions in August, 1941.