Henry Clausen
American lawyer (1905-1992)

Henry Christian Clausen (30 June 1905 – 4 December 1992) was an American lawyer, and investigator. He authored 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.
Biography
Clausen, a lawyer and a former Assistant United States 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 (well publicized) court martial of Army inspectors for fraudulent inspections of aircraft engines at the Wright Aeronautical engine manufacturing facility in Lockland, 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". He appeared before the Congressional Hearing, and was asked to show Congressman Murphy his Summary exhibit of Far Eastern documents, as Congressmen Ferguson and Gearhart who were in the "Kimmel camp" had held onto the two copies sent to the committee to prevent other members seeing them.
He decided to write the book Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement in 1991 (published in 1992) in opposition to what he described as “inaccurate conspiracy theories” of the Pearl Harbor attack.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Henry Clausen” as american lawyer (1905-1992). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american lawyer (1905-1992). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15455273. VIAF identifies the subject as 25933751. The Library of Congress control number is n81116826. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1905, 1992, 1945 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Clausen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.