National Affairs: Hull’s Fire

There were still deep fires in the old Tennesseean. For months, in silent retirement, he had smoldered quietly. Now he blazingly erupted.

The object of 74-year-old Cordell Hull’s wrath was the Army Investigating Board’s Pearl Harbor report (TIME, Sept. 10). The report, branding his note to the Japs on Nov. 26, 1941 as an “ultimatum,” had gone on to say: “It was the document that touched the button that started the war, as Ambassador Grew so aptly expressed it.”

Before the Pearl Harbor Committee last week, Cordell Hull was asked what he thought about this sentence. His tired voice scarcely rose but the words crackled ominously: “If I could express myself as I would like, I would want all of you religious-minded persons to retire from the room.

“I have sat under that infamous charge for months. … I was gratuitously brought into [the report]—apparently on the theory that Tojo and his military elements, who were moving on a world rampage, were not guilty, but that this Government of a peaceful people, with no preparations in the Pacific to fight, with no two-ocean navy, was the cause of poor innocent Tojo being dragged into war….

“Any rational person knows the Japs had started on this attempt and nothing could stop them unless we should lie down like cowards. And we would have been cowards!”

After that, the corroboration of Joseph C. Grew, the pre-Pearl Harbor Ambassador to Tokyo, was an anticlimax: “[The Hull note] was in no respect an ultimatum…. I never said the Hull reply touched the button. I never understood how the board got that impression.”