MacArthur, Keenan and the American Quest for Justice at the IMTFE
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"In the summer of 1946, John H. Higgins, the recently appointed US judge to the
International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE; Tokyo trial), hastily
resigned to return to his position as Chief Justice of the Superior Court of
Massachusetts. Joseph B. Keenan, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, who had
opposed Higgins’s appointment, was incensed, as was Tom C. Clark, the Attor
ney General of the United States, who had insisted on it. Though Higgins stated
in his letters to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the
Allied Powers (SCAP), Clark and Keenan that his decision was based solely on
the fact that he had been misled about the potential length of the trial and
problems replacing him on the Massachusetts court. He told his daughter in a
private letter in July that he was also deeply troubled by Keenan’s ‘organizing
ability and tact for the difficult task of molding the confidence of associate
prosecutors’. Keenan, he went on, also ‘failed in his contact and associations
with his fellow Americans’. He also told her that though Keenan’s staff had
gathered a remarkable body of evidence, these problems led to a prosecutorial
‘failure in the presentation of this case’ before the tribunal. This, coupled with
what Higgins said were ‘several instances of [Keenan’s] conduct that I don’t
care to mention’, left him with serious doubts about the future of the trial."
ISBN
978-90-04-36105-8
Publication Date
3-6-2018
Publisher
Brill
City
Leiden, The Netherlands
Disciplines
Asian History | Military History | Other History | Political History | Public History | United States History
Recommended Citation
Crowe, David M. "MacArthur, Keenan and the American Quest for Justice at the IMTFE". In Transcultural Justice at the Tokyo Tribunal, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018) https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004361058_005
Copyright
Brill
Comments
In Kerstin von Lingen (Ed.), Transcultural Justice at the Tokyo Tribunal: The Allied Struggle for Justice, 1946-48.
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