Henry Clausen

Who was Henry Clausen?

Henry Christian Clausen was the author of the Clausen Report, an 800-page report on the Army Board’s Pearl Harbor Investigation. He traveled over 55,000 miles over seven months in 1945, and interviewed nearly a hundred personnel, Army, Navy, British and civilian, as a Special Investigator for the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson carrying out an investigation ordered by Congress of the Secretary of War.

Clausen, a lawyer and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney from San Francisco, and a "civilian at heart" had joined up "for the duration" of the war, being discharged in August 1945. He was not a Reserve officer. He had been the Trial Judge Advocate for the Army at the court martial of Army inspectors for fraudulent inspections of aircraft engines at the Wright Aeronautical engine manufacturing facility in Lackland, Ohio.

He was a Republican like Stimson, who Clausen regarded as "a man of truly heroic stature". Clausen wrote about Congressman's Gearhart’s attack on him during the Congressional Hearing that "I was a Republican myself, and a fiscal conservative, too".