A quotation from Nicholson Baker’s 2008 book, “Human Smoke”: “Henry Stmson [Roosevelt’s Republican Secretary of War and reputedly a member of Skull and Bones] was writing in his diary. He, Knox, Stark, Hull, and Marshall had been in the Oval Office with the president, batting around a problem that Roosevelt had brought up. The Japanese were likely to attack soon, perhaps next Monday, the president said. ‘The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,’ Stimson wrote. ‘It was a difficult proposition.’ I was November 25, 1941.”