Pearl Harbor - by Roberta Wohlstetter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

It would be reassuring to believe that Pearl Harbor was just a colossal and extraordinary blunder. What is disquieting is that it was a supremely ordinary blunder. It was a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a cold war crisis. The results, at Pearl Harbor, were sudden, concentrated, and dramatic. The failure, however, was cumulative, widespread, and rather drearily familiar. This why surprise, when it happens to a government, cannot be described just in terms of startled people. Whether at Pearl Harbor or at the Berlin Wall, surprise is everything involved in a government's (or in an alliance's) failure to anticipate effectively. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision is a unique physiology of a great national failure to anticipate. Wohlstetter is at pains to show how easy it was to slip into the rut in which the Japanese found us, it can only remind u how likely it is that we are in the same kind of rut right now. The danger is not that we shall read the signals and indicators with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations-a routine obsessing with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely. Alliance diplomacy, interservice bargaining, appropriations hearings, and public discussion all seem to need to focus on a few vivid and oversimplified dangers. The planner should think in subtler and more variegated terms and all for a wider range of contingencies. But, as Wohlstetter shows, the "planners" who count are also responsible for alliance diplomacy, interservice bargaining, appropriations hearings, and public discussion; they are also very busy. This is a genuine dilemma of government. Some of its consequences are mercilessly displayed in this book.

From the Back Cover

It would be reassuring to believe that Pearl Harbor was just a colossal and extraordinary blunder. What is disquieting is that it was a supremely ordinary blunder. In fact, 'blunder' is too specific; our stupendous unreadiness at Pearl Harbor was neither a Sunday-morning, nor a Hawaiian, phenomenon. It was just a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a cold-war crisis.

Review Quotes

"Prodigiously researched, lucidly and excitingly written, and absolutely fair work of scholarship. It is one of those rare specimens in the literature of current history, the definitive book."
The New York Times

"Unquestionably the best book to date on the Pearl Harbor disaster. . . . Admirable both as history and analysis."
--Walter Millis
, The American Historical Review


"Well researched, clearly and excitingly written, and skillfully and admirably organized. One might say that Mrs. Wohlstetter has written the definitive book."
The Review of Politics

About the Author

Roberta Wohlstetter was a historian of military intelligence who worked for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, from 1948 to 1965 where she continued on as a consultant through 2002. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan jointly with her husband in 1985.