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What are you talking about? We have ample primary sources to document the ways in which the State Department ignored threats to European Jews by the Nazi German regime, and in which the State Department conspired to keep information as to the fate of European Jews away from the President. We also have evidence that many Jewish leaders either could not believe what their sources were telling them, or that they tried without avail to get the word to upper levels of the Roosevelt Administration. One particularly painful episode was the silence of Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom FDR had named to the Supreme Court. FF knew that one of his revered teachers in Austria was targeted by the Nazis but kept silent. In a rare exception, FDR found out about the matter and upbraided FF for his silence; FF explained that he did not want even to be seen as asking for special favors, and also that he believed that it would do no good to ask.
On the Pearl Harbor matter, there is also extensive primary source documentation indicating (i) that the United States simply did not believe that Japan would move against the actual territory of the United States, (ii) that the Japanese screwed up their attempt to coordinate the breach of diplomatic relations with the launch of the war, and (iii) that although British and American intelligence knew of the Japanese fleet's departure on an unspecified mission, they assumed that it would be heading for British and American possessions in the Pacific and not for American territory.
Your dismissal of references is beside the point: The two books I cited are authoritative and reliable, and their conclusions have been borne out by the work of many later scholars and researchers. Moreover, although historical interpretations may change over half a century or a century, primary sources tend not to change at all -- unless we unearth new ones, and we've got all the primary sources we need, except for the stuff still sealed away in Russian and Chinese archives.
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