The “Pearl Harbor Scene” in “The Godfather”

Although I’ve seen it dozens of times, I cannot resist watching “The Godfather” yet again whenever I run across it on the TV.  It happened again recently, and there was a very interesting scene that I’ve never caught before.  In the final scene of “The Godfather, Part II,”  “Sonny,” the hothead son of Mafia boss Vito Corleone, is going on and on about “them Japs” upon hearing  on the radio of the attack on Pearl Harbor over the family dinner table.  His stepbrother “Tom Hagen” (Robert Duval), the crime family lawyer and counselor, nonchalantly responds by saying “We should have expected it after the oil embargo.”  “What are you, a Jap Lover?!” says Sonny the loose cannon.

Japan imports all of its oil, and the Roosevelt administration had been waging war on Japan for years at that time by using the U.S. Navy to keep oil shipments from reaching Japan.  That of course was a blatant act of war that existed long before the Japanese retaliated at Pearl Harbor.  How interesting that Francis Ford Coppola included it in the script for The Godfather.  (For more on this, see the book Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett).

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