Kimmel did take the blame for Pearl Harbor and that had to have been heartbreaking. Replace him with anyone else and they would have done pretty much exactly what he did. Kimmel was basically exonerated when they conducted a study to find what went wrong at Pearl Harbor, but he was sacrificed to protect America’s trust in FDR, to the degree that Washington wouldn’t clear his name even after the war.
Was he deliberately kept in the dark and FDR somehow knew that the Japanese were planning an attack? No way. Like 9/11, we knew an attack was coming, but we didn’t know when and where. Attacking Pearl Harbor made little strategic sense, and despite the emotional shock, the losses were quickly replaced and it galvanized our will to fight.
What it comes down to is an incredible job of the Japanese to sneak their fleet out of Japan undetected and continue across the North Pacific during Winter, a very difficult task considering how hard it would be to navigate through storms without stars for much of the journey and to do so under total radio silence. We can’t even keep our ships from banging together nowadays with GPS and computers, despite it being peacetime. The fact that they arrived where they intended without being spotted took an incredible amount of skill and luck (we couldn’t cross the Pacific without being spotted for the Doolittle Raid).
We think that because Japan was so successful that it had to have been because FDR secretly knew or that our generals and admirals let us down. That, to me, is narcissistic. Bottom line is the Japanese were so successful because they were very good, and were willing to carry out a sneak attack.
I recommend to you a very good book on this subject, “Day of Deceit”. It covers events leading up to the attack very well. Kimmel was a very good admiral but was left in the dark and later hung out to dry.