All Manning Kimmel wants is 15 minutes with George W. Bush.

Fifteen minutes. That’s all the Rock Hill radio station executive says he’d need to restore the honor of his late grandfather. Adm. Husband Edward Kimmel was the officer in charge of the Naval fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor when Japan perpetrated its surprise attack 61 years ago today to thrust America into World War II.

Ten days after the strike resulted in 2,471 American deaths, the admiral and Army Lt. Gen. Walter Short were removed from their commands. And 39 days after that, a hastily formed government commission found them derelict in their duty for failing to ready the troops for the attack.

Both men were pressured to resign at lower ranks – Kimmel, who died in 1968, as a rear admiral from four-star admiral. Short died in 1949 a major general.

For years, Kimmel and then his descendants have fought Washington to restore his and Short’s highest wartime ranks. Historians have called them the last victims of Pearl Harbor.

Now the Kimmel family says the matter rests with Bush – stalled indefinitely by Sept. 11 and the ensuing war on terrorism.

“You give me 15 minutes – I’ll take 10 – and I can almost assure that the commander in chief would come to this conclusion: ‘Why has this been allowed to go on all these many years?”‘ said Manning Kimmel, 54, who with father, Ned, and cousin Tom Kimmel Jr. carry on the cause almost daily.

“All the president has to do is write a one-sentence letter to the U.S. Senate saying he supports restoring the ranks of Adm. Kimmel and Gen. Short.

“We’re not asking for any monetary reward. We’re not asking for a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s a simple matter of honor.”

The Kimmels have long contended that there are public documents proving that Washington had information of the impending Japan attack but withheld it from Pearl Harbor.

Historians have said that if the information had been phoned to Kimmel – instead of mailed – he would have had at least 1 1/2 hours more to ready the troops and button up ships.

Instead, he and Short became the disaster’s scapegoats.

For three years, the admiral blamed himself for the attack until he was told Japanese codes about the attack had been broken but never communicated.

“He came back from Pearl Harbor like a dog with his tail between his legs,” Ned Kimmel, 81, said. “After he was given this information, he became a raging tiger.”

Ned Kimmel and his brother Tom (who died in 1997), both Navy veterans, and their sons, Manning and Tom Jr., took up the admiral’s cause in 1987, after the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. passed a resolution honoring Kimmel and Short.

They were inspired by the association’s resolution that concluded Kimmel and Short were treated harshly and unfairly.

“We thought perhaps the country’s attitudes on this matter had changed,” said Ned Kimmel, a retired lawyer from Wilmington, Del., who still spends hours every week working on his father’s case. “These were the people who were impacted the worst by the attack.”

They are guided by the Officer Personnel Act of 1947 that allowed all officers to retire at their full wartime rank. The Kimmels say Adm. Kimmel and Gen. Short were the only officers excluded from the list.

In 1996, the Pentagon said it wouldn’t restore the ranks, but issued a report that said the blame should be “broadly shared” and not rest solely on Kimmel and Short.

The report, by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Edwin Dorn, acknowledged numerous “miscommunications” between Pearl Harbor and Washington.