Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt goad the Japanese into attacking U.S. interests so the country would be drawn into World War II?

It’s one of the most enduring controversies of Pearl Harbor, generating book after book re-examining the evidence.

After the disaster on Dec. 7, 1941, an outraged America demanded to know: How could this have happened?

There was the realization Japan had been underestimated. Roosevelt — desperately seeking to help Great Britain and already engaged in an undeclared war against Germany — next came into the public’s crosshairs.

Many in America still did not want to be involved in another foreign conflict.

A school of thought arose that Roosevelt secretly propelled the United States into the world war against Germany via a back door — by inciting Japan to attack Hawaii. War with Japan also would mean war with its Tripartite Pact partners Germany and Italy.

John T. Flynn, a prominent isolationist, wrote in 1944 of the ultimatum delivered to Japan on Nov. 26, 1941, by Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanding withdrawal of Japanese forces from China and French Indochina — in essence abandonment of its empire.

“Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hull sat back and waited for Japan to attack,” Flynn wrote. He added, “Of course, it was never supposed that Japan would attack us as she did.” Instead, the expectation was that Japan would strike in the Philippines, Guam or elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In 1954 retired Rear Adm. Robert A. Theobald, commander of the Pacific Fleet’s destroyers at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack, penned “The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor,” in which he maintained that Roosevelt retained a weak Pacific Fleet in Hawaii as “an invitation to a surprise Japanese attack.”

Roosevelt also denied Hawaii commanders “invaluable” intelligence decoded from Japanese dispatches, Theobald said.

An opposing school of thought by Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, authors of “At Dawn We Slept,” holds that while Roosevelt and others in Washington, D.C., were certainly guilty of incompetence when it came to the intelligence derived from Japanese diplomatic traffic, “nothing in his (Roosevelt’s) history suggests that this man could plot to sink American ships and kill thousands of American soldiers and sailors.”

In 1940 and 1941 the United States wasn’t ready for a dual-front war, and diplomacy with Japan largely reflected the U.S. desire to buy time to build up its military, the authors maintain. At the time the U.S. Army was the 17th strongest in the world.

Germany and the Atlantic were the priority, and “if Roosevelt wanted war, he had no reason to push for it in the Pacific,” they said.

Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, who blamed Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall for the Pearl Harbor debacle, did not believe they wanted to sacrifice the fleet, according to “At Dawn We Slept.”

But Kimmel felt they “assumed that one American could deal with five Japanese and that even a surprise attack would be beaten off without great losses.”

The authors throw cold water on Kimmel’s theory by noting that Washington, D.C., couldn’t have known that Japan wouldn’t hit the fleet fuel supply and Navy Yard, which would have caused immeasurably more damage to the U.S. war machine.

Prange, who was chief of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s historical section and spent more than 30 years studying Pearl Harbor, “thought it an absurdity to assert that Roosevelt risked the prime units of the U.S. Pacific Fleet — the very tactical tools the United States would need in a Pacific conflict — to justify a declaration of war,” his co-authors said.

Yet Robert B. Stinnett, in his 1999 book, “Day of Deceit,” also maintains that Roosevelt, in concert with his advisers, purposely provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor.

Stinnett cites, among other evidence, an October 1940 memorandum by Lt. Cmdr. Arthur H. McCollum, with the Office of Naval Intelligence, in which McCollum advocates a “prompt and early declaration of war” against Japan to bring about its collapse.

But in the “present state of political opinion,” it was not believed the United States could declare war on Japan, so McCollum suggested eight steps that might lead Japan to commit an overt act of war. Among those, McCollum proposed keeping the fleet in Hawaii and completely embargoing all U.S. trade with Japan.

“Roosevelt’s ‘fingerprints’ can be found on each of McCollum’s proposals,” Stinnett said. But whether Roosevelt even read the report is unclear.

The Miller Center at the University of Virginia noted that Roosevelt, who died in 1945, rarely revealed clear policy courses for the nation.

“Consistency never bothered Roosevelt,” Prange, Goldstein and Dillon said in another book, “Verdict of History.” “He had few political principles that he could not jettison if expediency demanded.”