A Fallen Star When Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, Admiral Husband Kimmel got blamed. Now, his only surviving son struggles to clear his father's name. Delaware Today, December 2002 Ned Kimmel of Wilmington is old but not tired or resigned. He walks slowly but talks briskly. A retired DuPont lawyer, he's lived in Delaware for more than 50 years. At age 81, he has been chasing a tiny silver star for the past 15 years, and he's petitioned senators and presidents and decorated war veterans to help him catch it. It's a star that once rested on his father's chest. That was when his father, Husband E. Kimmel, commanded the Navy's United States and Pacific Fleets in 1941 as a four-star admiral. But on Dec. 7, 1941, Admiral Kimmel woke at 7:55 a.m. to see Japanese planes flooding the sky above his fleet. Only sirens and cries for help perforated the noise from the constant blasts. That day, Kimmel lost more than 2,000 men. The next day, Congress called for his head. Kimmel's appointment as commander of the Pacific Fleet in January 1941 surprised no one more than him. A competent leader, he had held a comfortable rank as a three-star rear admiral in charge of three divisions of light cruisers. He came from a "warrior family" ‹ his father Manning Marius Kimmel fought in the Civil War, and his brother-in-law Thomas Kinkaid commanded the Navy's Seventh Fleet. But Kimmel did not particularly aspire to command the whole fleet, mostly because he thought the position was locked in the capable hands of Admiral James Richardson, his superior. Early one Sunday evening, after a round of golf, Kimmel received word that Richardson had been relieved of his duties. Kimmel was promoted to a four-star admiral and took over as the fleet's commander. Less than a year after Kimmel's promotion, the Japanese surprise attack on his fleet launched the United States into World War II. Before the attack, the majority of the American public opposed entering the war. But after the attack, the public galvanized and unanimously decried not only the Japanese but also the U.S. commanders at Pearl Harbor, whom the media and the government had painted as unprepared for an attack. The blame fell almost solely on the shoulders of Kimmel and his colleague General Walter C. Short, commander of the Army's Hawaiian Department. Two weeks after the attack, Kimmel and Short were removed from their duties and President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a commission led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Owen D. Roberts to investigate the disaster. The commission's closed-door investigation afforded Kimmel and Short few opportunities to defend themselves. On Jan. 23, 1942, about six weeks after the bombing, the Roberts Commission released its report, which stated that Kimmel and Short had been "derelict in their duties." The men were demoted to their previous ranks, Kimmel to a three-star rear admiral and Short to a two-star lieutenant general. Shortly afterward, both officers retired, publicly disgraced. At first, Kimmel blamed himself. He agonized over every detail of his 10-month term, trying to spot what crucial detail he had missed. Most of the men who had worked closest to him had left to fight in the war and could only lend their support through infrequent letters. For two years, he lived quietly, tortured by his mistakes. He received a heavy flow of hate mail. A municipal court judge in San Francisco wrote, "History will forever point an accusatory finger at both of you, and to your memory, when each has passed to the realm where so many of our men were so suddenly hurled because of your joint neglect and utter stupidity." Another judge wrote, "I suggest that Š you try to show that you are a real man by using a pistol and ending your existence, as you are certainly of no use to yourself nor the American people." Even his wife, Dorothy, received letters riddled with insults. One day in January of 1944, the U.S. Navy's chief cryptographer, Laurence Safford, visited Kimmel in secret and confessed that the Navy had knowledge before the attack that the Japanese were targeting Pearl Harbor and that this information was withheld from Kimmel. "Up until that point, my father had blamed himself," Ned says. "He was like a dog with his tail between his legs." But upon hearing the cryptographer's news, "the tail came out from between his legs and he was madder than hell." In truth, Pearl Harbor was really a terrible place to anchor the Pacific Fleet. It was almost as far away from the U.S. mainland as it was from Japan, and all of the fleet's fuel and supplies had to be shipped from California. Honolulu could be attacked from all sides, whereas if the fleet had been based in California, the Navy wouldn't have had to worry about air attacks from the east. Kimmel knew about all these deficiencies when he became the fleet's commander, but he also knew he had to tread lightly on this issue with Roosevelt. After all, his predecessor, Admiral Richardson, had been dismissed because he brought it up and requested the fleet be moved from Pearl Harbor to California. During the months leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack, Kimmel was unaware that the high commanders in Washington were withholding intelligence information from him. In September 1941, three months before the attack, U.S. cryptographers noticed that Japanese agents and diplomats in Honolulu were cataloging the ships at Pearl Harbor and sending their findings back to Tokyo. They reported the types of ships and their locations in a grid pattern. They also sent word to Tokyo whenever a ship departed from or arrived at the harbor. This information was never shared with Kimmel or Short. Nor was the deadline of Nov. 26 that the Japanese had set for the United States to reach a diplomatic resolution with Japan. Even after that date had passed, Kimmel received no direct word that war could be coming. But the most crucial information withheld from Kimmel was a 13-part message decoded by U.S. intelligence on Dec. 6, the day before the bombing. The message was sent from Tokyo to its U.S. ambassadors, who were instructed to deliver it the next day as a declaration of war against the United States. Roosevelt read the decrypted message that night, more than 12 hours before the Pearl Harbor attack, yet no one in Hawaii received word of the message until a half hour after the first bombs had rained down on the Pacific Fleet. One detail that points to Kimmel's culpability, though, is the warning he received from the Navy days before the attack that the Japanese were burning their code books, which Washington officials assumed he would recognize as a sure sign that war was approaching. Kimmel did not, however, interpret those messages to mean that war was imminent. But because of all of the information that was withheld, Kimmel demanded new investigations of the Pearl Harbor disaster after his conversation with the cryptographer. The Naval Court of Inquiry held a formal investigation in 1944 and exonerated Kimmel, but their findings remained classified until after the war, and anyway, the media had already effectively lynched him. Kimmel worked the rest of his life to clear his name. He died in 1968, with no regrets, Ned says. "He felt he did all he could." Now Ned, who is Husband Kimmel's only surviving son, is trying to do more to restore his father's good name. Since 1986, he and his family have campaigned for the posthumous restoration of his father's four-star rank, and Delaware has been the home base of operations. Ned contracted the public relations firm Sam Waltz and Associates to help him strategize. He also wrote to Delaware's congressmen for help. In 1995, Ned's petitions prompted an investigation led by Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn, which concluded that "responsibility for the Pearl Harbor disaster should not fall solely on the shoulders of Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Short, it should be broadly shared." And in December 2000, Delaware Senators Joe Biden and Bill Roth and Rep. Mike Castle banded behind Ned's cause when they voted in favor of the Defense Authorization Act of 2001, which contained a provision calling for the restoration of Kimmel and Short's highest-held ranks. All that's needed now is President George W. Bush's signature, and the late admiral's rank will be restored. But so far, Bush has been unwilling to do so without the support of the Department of Defense, which has always opposed granting the posthumous four-star rank. Still, Ned continues to chase that tiny silver star. He sits at his desk in his home office (he calls it the "War Room") and writes letters to President Bush and Department of Defense officials. He tries to gather grassroots support by speaking to World War II veterans groups. But even they are old ‹ the youngest veterans are in their late 70s. Among historians, those who are most likely to support Kimmel usually subscribe to a Roosevelt conspiracy theory, which suggests that Roosevelt needed a way to convince the American public to go to war, so he purposely left Pearl Harbor vulnerable. But Ned tries hard not to get lumped in with the conspiracy theorists, knowing that Roosevelt's reputation is untouchable. He keeps his focus off the former president and instead suggests that the Navy's top commanders were to blame. He delivers his father's story with passion ‹ he calls it "the gospel" ‹ and acknowledges that his family's mission has consumed most of his time. In the mid-1960s, as Husband Kimmel's life wound down, someone asked him, "What keeps you alive, Admiral?" The old admiral replied, "Pearl Harbor keeps me alive." "And I say the same thing," Ned says, leaning back in his chair in the War Room. If he captures his father's star in his lifetime, he'll rest in peace. But even if the star eludes him on his deathbed, he has faith that his warrior family will continue the quest. His son Manning and his nephew Thomas have also joined the cause and sometimes accompany Ned to speaking engagements. "This is not going to die," Ned says, "because we're not going to let it die." Shaun Gallagher is Delaware Today's managing editor.