The morning of Wednesday, August 26, 1942, was sunny and cool in Washington. Joe Grew and Bob Fearey emerged from the front door of the Ambassador’s home on 2840 Woodland Drive in the northwest quadrant of the city. It was a large brick house situated slightly below the street and almost completely shielded from view by tall bushes along the street line. The property of almost two acres continued to slope downward toward a backyard populated by large trees that provided the kind of privacy that Grew had enjoyed in Tokyo.
The two men got into the backseat of Grew’s black Cadillac. The driver maneuvered the car up the circular driveway and then turned left for the short trip to the State, War and Navy Building for Grew’s appointment with the Secretary of State. The meeting would mark his first personal encounter with Hull since his return from Tokyo.
The United States and Japan had completed the details of an exchange of diplomatic personnel, journalists, and other prisoners the previous June. Grew and the other Embassy personnel (as well as everyone else returning to the United States) had boarded the Asama Maru, a Japanese ship, on June 17 for a scheduled departure on June 18. The departure was then delayed because the United States had insisted on the release of several American teachers in northern Japan who had been arrested as spies. That information was not shared with all the passengers, and the uncertainty created consternation among some that the exchange might be cancelled. “I’ll jump off the ship and try to drown myself,” said one man who had been imprisoned and tortured in the prior months, “rather than go back to what would face us on shore.”
The American teachers were finally released, and the Asama Maru slipped out of Yokohama’s harbor around midnight on June 24 for the trip to Lourenco Marques in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique on the east coast of Africa. There the passengers were transferred to the SS Gripsholm, a Swedish American Line ship that had brought Japanese diplomats and other Japanese personnel from the United States (who then boarded the Asama Maru for the return to Japan). The Gripsholm transported its new passengers around the Cape of Good Hope to Rio de Janeiro for a brief respite. The ship then departed for New York on August 11.
Alice decided to remain in Brazil for a visit with Elsie, who had flown in from Chile, where she was stationed with her husband (who was also in the Foreign Service). Grew asked Fearey to share the cabin with him on the trip from Rio de Janeiro to New York. The ship arrived in New York on August 25, and the two men took the train back to Washington that afternoon.
In that two-week voyage from Rio de Janeiro, the Ambassador and his private secretary spent considerable time discussing the report that Grew planned to give to Hull upon his return. It was not a routine matter. The Ambassador had spent a good portion of his time during internment drafting and polishing the report on legal-sized paper (after receiving comments from Fearey, Dooman, and other Embassy personnel with whom he had shared the drafts). By the time they were ready to board the Asama Maru, the report filled sixty of those legal-sized pages (and would eventually include telegrams and other documents in an addendum of more than a hundred pages).
Removing the report from Japan was no easy matter. Grew was concerned that Japanese custom officials would seize the report if they became aware of it. Secrecy was therefore required, but the logistics were challenging. Grew initially decided to have copies given to seven different Embassy personnel in the hope that at least one copy would make it through inspection. However, sixty pages of legal-sized paper could not be folded without creating a bulge in the coat pocket. And so, as Fearey later explained, it was decided to punch two holes at the top of each copy, place a string through the two holes, and hang the copies “down our backs inside our shirts, suspended by concealed strings around our necks.”
The importance that Grew attached to the report was not surprising. He was bitter about his experience in those last months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the report recounted his disappointment in great detail. A few days after the Gripsholm left Rio de Janeiro, Grew drafted a letter to the President that would attach a copy of the report and be given to Roosevelt upon Grew’s return to the United States. The letter said that the Ambassador’s “final political report” was something that warranted the President’s perusal because “it will presumably be carefully weighed by future historians” on the question of whether “war with Japan could have been avoided.”
The bulk of the letter focused on Roosevelt’s failure to meet with Konoye. “For the first time in ten years,” said the letter, American policy “had created in Japan a soil fertile for the sowing of new seeds.…” Grew explained that Konoye had told him—“with unquestionable sincerity”—that “he was prepared at that meeting to accept the American terms whatever they might be.” Japan’s leaders, said the Ambassador, understood that any agreement with the United States would entail a withdrawal of all forces from China and Indochina “with the mere face-saving expedient of leaving garrisons in Mongolia and North China, which in fact was what other nations had done up to that time.” As for the Tripartite Pact, said Grew, “it could not have been immediately and overtly disavowed,” but any agreement with the United States would have rendered it “a dead letter.…”
Grew could not resist criticism of Hull’s insistence that Japan’s commitment to a comprehensive agreement be a condition to any meeting between Roosevelt and Konoye. “I told the Department,” the letter advised the President, “that this problem could never be solved by formulas” because “the Japanese Government was constantly afraid of written records which would have inevitably come to the attention of the political and military extremists” and would almost certainly have caused the fall of the government “through overthrow or assassinations.…”
Grew understood that other factors—“of which [he] was kept in ignorance”—could have influenced the decisions of Roosevelt and his Secretary of State. Grew nonetheless felt compelled to mention in the letter three questions that had “bewildered” him.
The first question concerned the administration’s failure to give “any encouragement whatsoever” to Konoye with respect to his proposed meeting with the President. “Was the transcendent importance to our country of preserving peace,” the letter rhetorically asked Roosevelt, “to depend on the utterly futile effort to find mutually satisfactory formulas?”
The second question concerned the President’s failure to follow the recommendation in Grew’s telegram of August 30—namely, that Roosevelt include in his Labor Day speech, or in any other speech, “a clear conception of the concrete advantages” Japan would secure through an agreement with the United States. Grew said he had told Hull that he would have had the speech widely published in Japan because “it would have immeasurably strengthened Prince Konoye’s hand at a moment when he terribly needed strengthening.…”
The last question concerned Hull’s refusal to respond to Konoye’s and Toyoda’s repeated pleas for the State Department to set forth the terms that the United States wanted Japan to accept. That refusal, said the letter, “inevitably conveyed to [Konoye] and his associates the unfortunate impression that our Government was merely playing for time and had no real intention to come to an agreement with Japan.” Grew acknowledged that the Hull Note did finally set forth the terms that the United States wanted to include in any agreement, but the delay in providing those terms caused the Hull Note to be “interpreted in Japan as an ultimatum” that could not be the basis for further negotiation. “My own belief,” said the Ambassador, “although this can only be a matter of speculation, is that war, while all the plans had been long prepared, was definitely determined upon only after the receipt of the [Hull Note].”
Grew was not prepared to share his report or his letter to the President with the many reporters who hurled questions at him as he and Fearey entered the outer office of the Secretary of State’s suite in the southwest corner of the State, War and Navy Building. The exchanges with the journalists did not last long, and the Ambassador was soon ushered into Hull’s office while Fearey waited in the reception area.
It was not a pleasant meeting. Grew handed the report to Hull, and, as the aged Tennessean began to leaf through it, his face became flushed and his anger evident. As Grew later told Fearey, Hull “half threw the report back across the desk” toward him, saying, “Mr. Ambassador, either you promise to destroy this report and every copy you may possess or we will publish it and leave it to the American people to decide who was right and who was wrong.” Fearey could not make out Hull’s comments, but he could hear the Secretary of State’s raised voice through the closed office door. For his part, Grew protested that the document was “his honest, confidential report to his superiors in Washington, and that he could not in good conscience agree to destroy it.” Nor was Grew willing to accept the alternative of having his report—which was critical of the President and his administration—disseminated to the public. It was not appropriate, he told Hull, for him to be involved in “a public controversy in time of war when national unity was essential.”
Hull remained adamant about the destruction of the report, and, after about thirty minutes, Grew walked out of Hull’s office, clearly shaken by the encounter. He suggested to Fearey that they walk over to the nearby Metropolitan Club on H Street for lunch even though it was well before noon. As the two of them sat at a table adorned with a white linen tablecloth and fine silverware, Grew related the details of the meeting to his young protégé, including Hull’s request that Grew return the next morning at ten o’clock with a response to the Secretary of State’s demand that the report be destroyed or that it be made public. Grew and Fearey reviewed the alternatives, but, in truth, there were really none. And so Grew and Fearey returned to the State, War and Navy Building the next morning for the second meeting with the Secretary of State.
The Ambassador went into Hull’s office alone while Fearey again waited in the outer office. This time, there were no raised voices, and, after a short while, the two men emerged, smiling and obviously on friendly terms. Grew again suggested to his private secretary that they adjourn to a lunch at the Metropolitan Club. The Ambassador did not volunteer what had been said in the meeting with the Secretary of State, and so Fearey eventually posed a question about the fate of the report. Grew cryptically replied that “the Secretary had not mentioned it, but that he had expressed strong support for Grew’s planned nationwide speaking tour.”
Fearey was thus left with the impression that the report on which Grew had doted so much time for so many months would not be destroyed. It proved to be a false impression. The Ambassador had in fact agreed to Hull’s request that the report and all copies of the report be destroyed. In the absence of any report to give the President, Grew had also decided that the letter to Roosevelt would not be delivered.
There does not appear to be any written record of why Grew allowed Fearey to retain the mistaken impression about the report’s continued existence. Perhaps Grew was leery of saying—especially when the wounds of the Pearl Harbor attack were still fresh—that he had agreed to destroy a report on American-Japanese relations that was critical of the President and his Secretary of State. Perhaps it also reflected Grew’s sense of loyalty. More than just an ambassador, he saw himself as a patriot who placed his country’s welfare above any selfish interest he might have. And, believing that, he may have wanted to avoid any possibility that his actions (whether through publication of the report or disclosure that he had destroyed the report) would sow division in a country that, as he said, required unity in facing another world conflict.
Whatever the reason, Fearey would devote untold hours over decades after that Metropolitan Club lunch searching in vain for the report—in conversations with the former ambassador and Gene Dooman, through review of the papers Grew had deposited with the Houghton Library at Harvard, and in discussions with members of the Ambassador’s family. At one point in the late 1960s, Fearey took his teenage daughter Barbara (who was attending boarding school in Connecticut) to the home of Gene Dooman, then living in retirement in Litchfield. Fearey wondered whether a copy of the report might be in papers Dooman had stored in his attic. The former Embassy Counselor “was pretty negative about the possibility of there being a copy of the report,” remembered Fearey’s daughter, but he said, “ ‘Feel free. Search the attic.’ ” But of course Dooman’s pessimism proved to be well-founded.
Long before that search in Dooman’s attic, Congress too had expressed an interest in seeing any report Grew may have given Hull upon his return to the United States. The American public’s despair, anger, and frustration about the Pearl Harbor attack remained largely intact after the war had ended in 1945. There had been many investigations to explore how and why the United States Navy and Army were so unprepared for the surprise assault. One of them had been conducted by a commission Roosevelt had established in December 1941 under the chairmanship of Supreme Court Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts. The passage of time and the successful conclusion of the war had not dampened the interest in the inquiry, especially among Roosevelt’s critics. “Never before in our history,” said a September 1945 editorial in the Chicago Tribune (owned by Robert R. McCormick, a long-time Roosevelt nemesis), “did a President maneuver this country into a war for which it was unprepared, and then, thru insouciant stupidity, or worse, permit the enemy to execute a surprise attack costing the lives of 3,000 Americans.…”
Shortly after publication of the Tribune editorial, Congress created a special committee—composed of three Democratic Senators, two Republican Senators, three Democratic Congressmen, and two Republican Congressmen—to investigate again the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The committee convened on November 15 in the cavernous, marble-floored Senate Caucus Room (which would later be the location of the Senate Watergate hearings and, after Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s death in 2009, be re-named the Kennedy Caucus Room in honor of the three Kennedy brothers—John, Robert, and Edward—who had served in the Senate). One of the first witnesses was Joseph C. Grew, who appeared before the committee on November 26, 1945—the fourth anniversary of the Hull Note.
Grew had retired from the Foreign Service on August 15, 1945, but his meetings with Hull upon his return to the United States in 1942 had not impeded his career. He had served as a special assistant to the Secretary of State, and in May 1944, he had become Chief of the Far Eastern Division. Hull’s health had continued to deteriorate, and he resigned in November of that year. Grew was then appointed Under Secretary of State under Edward R. Stettinius, the new Secretary of State. He retained that position when James F. Byrnes succeeded Stettinius in July 1945. The former ambassador to Japan was the Acting Secretary of State throughout much of those first eight months in 1945 because both Stettinius and Byrnes spent considerable time attending meetings and conferences outside of Washington.
The congressional committee had no interest in Grew’s career after his return to the United States. The committee was focused instead on his opinions and writings during his ten-year service as America’s ambassador to Japan, especially during the months preceding the Pearl Harbor attack. At one point, Homer S. Ferguson, the fifty-six-year-old, white-haired, first-term Republican senator from Michigan, asked the former ambassador whether he had made a “report in writing” to Hull when he returned to the United States in August 1942.
Grew could not have forgotten the report on which he had devoted so much time and energy while he was interned at the Embassy in Tokyo. But his response to Senator Ferguson was less than precise. “Everything had been written pretty well up to date,” said Grew. “That wasn’t quite my question,” Ferguson replied. “No,” said the former ambassador, “I don’t recollect having submitted at that time any report in writing.” Ferguson was not prepared to drop the matter. “Will you think about that?” he asked the witness. “That could be an important report.” Grew did not want the matter to remain in suspension. “I can answer that question now,” he told Ferguson. “I did not submit, I did not file any report, any written report.”
Ferguson was not prepared to accept that vague response. “You said,” the Senator persisted, “that you didn’t file it, and that brought to my mind, ‘what did you mean by you didn’t file it?’ ” Grew responded that he had “notes” that he had used in his “talks with the Secretary.” When asked if he still had those notes, Grew replied, “They have been destroyed long ago.” When Ferguson continued to push Grew on the matter, the former ambassador asserted that he only had notes “to refresh” his memory.
The Michigan senator would not let the matter rest. “Did you suggest,” he asked Grew, “that you wanted to make such a final report in writing?” To that question, the witness had a clear answer: “Of course I did not.” Ferguson again reminded Grew that any such submission “would be an important report.” And when Ferguson again asked about the notes he had used in his talks with Hull, Grew again responded that they “have been destroyed.” In response to Ferguson’s further questions, Grew hewed the same line, telling the Senator that “he had talked it over” with Hull, that “the whole thing was completely on the record,” and that “no request was made for a written report because all the facts were already on file in the State Department.”
When the committee recessed for lunch, Grew undoubtedly realized that his testimony was not entirely accurate. He surely felt squeezed between the horns of a dilemma. He understood the importance of the truth. But he probably recognized that the Republican members of the committee, as well as other critics of Roosevelt and his administration, would squeal with delight if the administration’s ambassador to Japan revealed that he had honored the Secretary of State’s request to destroy a report that was critical of the Secretary as well as the President in their handling of Japanese-American relations prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. There was no clear path to reconcile those alternatives, but Grew decided over the lunch break that he could not let his testimony stand as it was. Something more had to be said. So, when the committee re-convened after lunch, Grew said he wanted to “correct one misstatement of this morning for the record.”
The committee was obviously prepared to let the former ambassador make the correction. But even then, Grew could not bring himself to disclose that Hull had asked him to destroy his report and that he had complied with the request. “Well,” said Grew, “[three] years have gone by since that time and, frankly, I had forgotten the fact that I did submit to Mr. Hull a series of dispatches, quite a number of reports, covering the whole story of the last days before Pearl Harbor, the events as they occurred in Japan, all of which is on the record, completely on the record, and has been brought out, I think before this committee.…” He added that the reports were “turned in to the State Department” and “are all available.…”
Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the committee chairman, asked Grew to confirm that he was referencing “reports made to Secretary Hull after the Ambassador returned from Japan in August 1942.…” Grew gave an affirmative response. Ferguson then asked the committee’s counsel to obtain those reports. And there the matter was left. But the committee’s hearing transcripts do not include a copy of the report.
Grew had no trouble remembering the report when Walter Johnson, a University of Chicago history professor, contacted him in November 1950 about material for book that would have a section on Japan. Johnson, apparently referencing Grew’s testimony, said he planned to use “the documents prepared for Mr. Hull dealing with the months just before Pearl Harbor.” In his letter to Johnson on November 23, Grew responded that he was “not sure precisely” what documents the history professor had in mind. “As I have told you,” Grew continued, “I gave Mr. Hull a promise that I would destroy the dispatch which I had intended to hand him on my return from Japan, and all copies thereof, adversely criticizing the Administration for its failure to allow the meeting between President Roosevelt and Prince Konoye.” Grew assured Johnson that he did not want “to tamper with the facts of history” but, he added, “I want to be very careful to avoid any future charge from [Hull] that I had quibbled on the word of honor which I gave him in August 1942 on returning from Japan that I would destroy that dispatch and all copies thereof.”
Not that Grew was deprived of telling his story and expressing his views without restraint. In 1952, Houghton Mifflin published his two-volume, 1,560-page memoir—Turbulent Era—which included a 132-page section entitled “Pearl Harbor: From the Perspective of Ten Years.” He had already had selected portions of his diary from the Tokyo period published in 1944 (Ten Years in Japan); in July 1952, he deposited his voluminous papers with the Houghton Library at Harvard; and a substantial portion of his Tokyo telegrams had been published by the State Department in a multi-volume series entitled Foreign Relations of the United States (which included a multitude of other telegrams and documents as well). And so, when people asked him during his retirement—as they often did—what he thought about Pearl Harbor, the former ambassador to Japan would invariably respond that “everything he has to say on the subject is in his papers.…”
It was the kind of modesty that had been the hallmark of Joe Grew’s career. But it could not mask the contribution he had made—and had tried to make—in protecting his country’s interests during a time of unprecedented turmoil.