On 2009-11-24 Don Reed, Cliffside Park NJ wrote: U.S.N. Commander Laurance Safford´s stubborn, selfless lifelong quest - which clobbered his marriage & sank his brilliant naval career - to prove that Admiral Husband Kimmel & General Walter Short had been scapegoated for the Pearl Harbor disaster, lends Infamy an irreversible credibility - that the author himself almost wrecked.
INF suffers from:
1) A clumsy chronological & narrative structure;
2) A noticeable decline in writing quality & manuscript editing expertise (compared to his previous superb histories: No Man´s Land, But Not In Shame, & Ships In The Sky).
A basic writing error of judgement is also appallingly evident: Toland, on too many occasions, ineptly champions the people whom he feels had been given a raw deal.
If the reader is bludgeoned by an author´s premature & strident opinions in the middle of various narratives, the sympathy rightly felt for the wrongly accused now is endangered by the reader´s irritation, unnecessarily created by the author.
Toland, all too often, is the equivalent of an overzealous prosecutor who, in the middle of a trial, jumps to his feet and delivers his closing summary against the accused - who is still on the witness stand.
Why Carolyn Blakemore & Ken McCormick, Toland´s editors, didn´t perceive the obvious - & then persuade Toland to restructure his manuscript, so that his opinions would mostly be restricted to the conclusions in the final chapter - is a mystery.
3) The inexplicable lack of an exact date chronology (always necessary, but now absolutely indispensable, due to the first listed liability); &
4) The absence of brief biographical sketches of the 103 generals, admirals, politicians, & others who are, instead, perfunctorily listed in a ´Cast of Principle Characters.´
A note on the ´star´ rating system. I gave it four stars because the book has inherent & commendable merit in its own right. To deduct stars for Infamy´s serious deficiencies, listed above, would warn off readers who otherwise would profit from reading the book.
´It was a tragedy that men like Stimson, Hull, Knox, & Forrestal felt obliged to join in the cover-up & make scapegoats of two innocent men, Kimmel & Short.´
(Respectively: Henry, Cordell, Frank, & James - Secretaries of War; State; the Navy; & the Navy (succeeding Knox) & later, of Defense; p. 323.)
My father was Frank Knox´s nephew; he mourned his uncle´s death in 1944. Later on - possibly in 1960 - I had been caught in a childish lie (it hadn´t occurred to me that trying to blame someone else for one´s own mistakes is a preposterous defense for an only child).
He pulled Daphne du Maurier´s novel, ´The Scapegoat,´ down from the book shelf. Fiercely pointing at the book´s title, he then lectured me quite audibly & sternly that what I had done was despicable.
Of course, he was right. But in retrospect, the issue - certainly a legitimate one - didn´t seem to merit the level of his explosion of concern about this specific ethical issue.
For it wasn´t like him to lose his temper. He handled pressure well & his ongoing, low-key tolerance for the unusual, the off-beat, & the creativity that fuels artistic & scientific achievements was quite remarkable. In this respect, few men were his equal.
Something really must hit a nerve.
I could be wrong, dead wrong. And the facts will never be known (he died in 1967, without having discussed in any detail his relationship with his famous - & to some, infamous uncle). So all I can do is pose the thought in the form of a question:
Was he having a flashback to what Toland would later describe in 1982 (above) as a ´tragedy´?
Clearly, he was justifiably irate that an eight-year-old would attempt to cover his little ass by unjustly blaming someone else for what had gone screwy.
But the memory of the depth of his passion led me to wonder, tonight, after having finished Infamy:
Is it possible that the issue triggered a vehement resentment he still harbored towards an adult - his own deceased relative - who, my father might have discovered as a journalist during or after WWII, had scapegoated two honorable men in the aftermath of the event that had galvanized America´s entrance into the war?
. And summed up by saying Did My Great-Uncle Unfairly Accuse Kimmel & Short?. Currently Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath has an overall rating of 6 over 10.
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