Cockburn and Vidal are certainly intelligent enough to recognize the holes in a poorly supported thesis if they choose to educate themselves about it. But they seem to want to believe it anyway -- and, worse, to actively promote it. Many other ordinary people I talked to about the theory also seemed to implicitly believe it, most of the time without having read a single book outlining the accusations.

Why? One theory is that conservative hostility to FDR's New Deal continues to the present day, and has over time succeeded in slipping the meme of Roosevelt's political depravity in under the radar of our national consciousness, sabotaging our ability to apply logic to the situation.

Given FDR's notorious "government interference" initiatives like Social Security, banking and securities regulation, farm price supports and -- worst of all -- that pesky minimum-wage and collective-bargaining legislation, it's not surprising that conservative capitalists in the '30s and '40s felt a level of hatred for him that wouldn't be matched until the days of Bill Clinton. (My grandmother, the daughter of a banker ruined in the crash, once told me that the sulfuric name of "Roosevelt" was never uttered at her family's dinner table. Like Clinton in many '90s households, FDR was always referred to only as "that man in the White House.")

To make matters worse, when Roosevelt emerged after Pearl Harbor as the "one who'd been right all along" about our vulnerability to fascist militarism, the isolationist Republican Party -- already staggered by the commie horrors of the New Deal -- was banished to the ninth circle of political hell for the duration (and then some). It accordingly launched an effort to transfer the ultimate responsibility for the debacle at Pearl Harbor from the military commanders in the field, Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, to the Roosevelt administration.

But given that one of the most fundamental duties of military command is ensuring readiness to meet attack, the only way to completely exonerate Kimmel and Short was to make a case that they'd been deliberately set up. Thus was born the first wave of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, which was America's favorite paranoid fantasy until the Kennedy assassination. It became such a cherished conservative myth that Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., instigated yet another official investigation of Pearl Harbor (the 10th) in 1995.

Despite that 1995 investigation coming to much the same conclusion as all others before it, the contrarian "FDR knew" meme lived on, and reached its apogee of respectability when the new Republican-dominated Congress recently passed a resolution absolving Kimmel and Short of any responsibility for the tragedy and restoring them posthumously to their highest ranks. It was a move that many people believe was extremely unwise. Military tradition, which runs much deeper than military law, has always held that whatever happens on your watch is your responsibility and that it is your duty to accept the consequences, however unfair they may seem. Congress' official endorsement of buck passing has not gone over well with everyone.

Truth be told, there was plenty of blame to go around, both in the field and in Washington. The constant tension between ensuring secrecy and giving operational units access to essential intelligence may not have been resolved in the best possible way before Pearl Harbor, and in any case, intelligence functions were tragically fragmented and dispersed. Robin Winks, professor of history at Yale University and author of "The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence," agrees with the conclusions of other investigators that there was a "massive operational failure" to use the intelligence we did obtain to good effect. "I believe we had the information, that it was not understood by those who had it, that those who most needed to have it didn't see it, and that FDR did not know, though perhaps by only the margin of a very few hours."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"