reinforced her refusal by saying, in a somewhat angry tone of voice,
"Don't you ever ask me to do this again. I don't want what happened to Frank to happen to me." I was both surprised and crestfallen. I understood only too well what she meant about what had happened to Frank. That was the first time she had made such a statement to me. However, because of her moral integrity I realized that she was as angry at herself as she was with me.
During dinner that evening in February of 1993, Helen Thomas and Frank and I kept wondering how we could appropriately bring up the matter of State's "cover-up" after Pearl Harbor. We hoped that by this time, Helen Shaffer, having retired from State a number of years before, might be forthcoming on the subject. For a half-hour or more we discussed the domestic political situation and the changes that might be expected with a democratic president in the White House again. Suddenly, as though she was reading our minds, Helen Shaffer, looking directly at Frank, abruptly changed the subject by blurting out:
"You must know, Frank, that they were really out to get you back then," meaning his three superiors in the year leading up to the attack in December of 1941.
Helen Thomas immediately asked, "Why would they have been out to get him?"
"Because he opposed the policy. They thought he was interfering."
Helen Thomas said, "But he turned out to be right!"
"That was the problem!" she exclaimed. "And they felt they had to do something about that."
"Olive told me you had said that they rewrote documents from hindsight, that, in fact, you did the retyping," Helen Thomas said.
"Yes I did. I got so tired of retyping those damned, long documents on those clumsy typewriters. Not only that, but they revised parts of the Foreign Relations Series. I finally asked for a transfer out of the Division."
"But what they did was a crime! How could they have done that?" Helen Thomas asked her..
"Well, I guess they felt that was the only way they could absolve themselves of blame."
The above is an accurate recollection of the conversation I