But the SS Lurline was on a southerly route to Honolulu from Long Beach, Calif., so the radio signals Grogan heard coming from the northwest could have been from Japan's shore-based radio facilities, not the carrier task force. Grogan claims he took his original log to naval authorities in Hawaii after the Lurline arrived on Dec. 3, but they didn't seem particularly interested. The Lurline's radio log was checked out of the National Archives without a date or signature sometime in the '70s, about the time another Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorist, John Toland ("Infamy"), was doing his original research.

But this "mysteriously" missing material could just as easily provide definitive proof that the "FDR knew" gang is full of it. Given that conspiracy theory has become, in the words of Paul Miles, Tomlinson Fellow in the History of War and Society at Princeton, a "cottage industry," it struck me that some of the documents in question could have been spirited away by people with another agenda entirely. Look at me! I can concoct conspiracies too!

"Anyone who does intelligence history (as I do)," says Robin Winks, "knows it is very difficult, highly technical and open to conspiracy theory, because inevitably some material is missing, and at times some material deliberately lied with a view to disinformation." For example, and apropos of the SS Lurline material, the Japanese later stated that they attempted to produce bogus radio traffic right before Pearl Harbor in the hope that it would confuse intercept agencies about the location of the silent fleet. It might not have fooled military professionals, but Leslie Grogan was an amateur.

The conspiracy theorists, in parallel with the creationists who maintain that God must have placed fossils in the ground to test his people's religious faith, also think that Roosevelt and his political allies managed not only to cover up their dastardly deeds but to fabricate thousands of linear feet of documents in order to camouflage the truth. It is perhaps remotely possible that some kind of massive effort of that kind was instituted here in America in the midst of wartime, but unless we want to believe that our former enemies have destroyed or manufactured material to burnish Roosevelt's reputation, evidence from Japanese archives also backs up the idea that the attack was a surprise to FDR.

Linda Goetz Holmes, for instance, a Pacific war historian with the Interagency Working Group at the National Archives and author of the book "Unjust Enrichment: How Japan's Companies Built Postwar Fortunes Using American POWs," told me about the findings of a Japanese historian whose research in his country's recently declassified files only became available in the U.S. in 1998. He revealed considerable documentary evidence of Japanese satisfaction with how well "our magnificent deception" was working in Washington.

Yet the "FDR knew" meme continues to thrive with supporters like Cockburn and Vidal, whose credibility should suffer from such carelessness, but somehow never does. The case of Vidal is particularly shocking, because he prides himself on demolishing cultural mythology, debunking "court historians" and pursuing the truth. Yet he embraces a dishonest "researcher" like Stennitt and lends his literary aura to a tissue of lies.

In 1941, both military and civilian authorities were operating from extremely bad -- and, it's important to note, very racist -- assumptions when it came to the Japanese. We simply couldn't believe that the "little beasts" had gotten the drop on us, or as Stanford historian David M. Kennedy indicates in his book "Freedom From Fear," that we as a people had made "systematic, pervasive and cumulative" mistakes that led to the disaster.

That there are rational, wide-reaching and comprehensible reasons for our failure to be prepared at Pearl Harbor is not an idea that sits well with most Americans. We'd much prefer to believe that the calamity wouldn't have happened if we weren't deliberately set up. In that sense the "FDR knew" theory is very comforting. It essentially absolves everyone except the nefarious Roosevelt and his diabolical cronies; it implies that everyone else, and all their procedures, decisions, organizations and attitudes, were impeccable. If only a better man had been in charge, this fairy tale goes, the yellow horde wouldn't have succeeded.

Such a view handicaps our ability to learn desperately needed lessons from the debacle. I'd much rather we admitted our mistakes -- all of them -- so that when future military men and women look out over Pearl Harbor in the morning they will be reminded, as I always was, of how quickly our smug assumptions can be blown out of the water.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"