From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   Franklin Roosevelt’s Sunday morning began as most of his Sundays began: with   
   a cigarette and the Sunday papers in bed. He wasn’t a regular churchgoer,   
   confining his attendance mainly to special occasions: weddings, funerals, his   
   three inaugurations.    
   In his youth and young adulthood he had often spent Sundays on the golf   
   course, but his golfing days were long over, to his lasting regret. This   
   Sunday morning–the first Sunday of December 1941–he read about himself in   
   the papers. The New York    
   Times gave him the top head, explaining how he had sent a personal appeal for   
   peace to the Japanese emperor. Neither the Times nor the Washington Post,   
   which provided similar coverage, included the substance of his appeal, as he   
   had directed the State    
   Department to release only the fact of his having approached the emperor. This   
   way he got credit for his efforts on behalf of peace without having to   
   acknowledge how hopeless those efforts were. The papers put the burden of   
   warmongering on Japan; the    
   government in Tokyo declared that its “patience” with the Western powers   
   was at an end. Heavy movements of Japanese troops in occupied In   
   ochina–movements about which Roosevelt had quietly released corroborating   
   information–suggested an imminent    
   thrust against Thailand or Malaya.   
      
   Sharing the headlines with the prospect of war in the Pacific was the reality   
   of war in the Atlantic and Europe. The German offensive against the Soviet   
   Union, begun the previous June, seemed to have stalled just short of Moscow.   
   Temperatures of twenty    
   below zero were punishing the German attackers, searing their flesh and   
   freezing their crankcases. The Germans were forced to find shelter from the   
   cold; the front apparently had locked into place for the winter. On the   
   Atlantic, the British had just    
   sunk a German commerce raider, or so they claimed. The report from the war   
   zone was sketchy and unconfirmed. The admiralty in London volunteered that its   
   cruiser Dorsetshire had declined to look for survivors, as it feared German   
   submarines in the area.   
      
   Roosevelt supposed he’d get the details from Winston Churchill. The   
   president and the prime minister shared a love of the sea, and Churchill,   
   since assuming his current office eighteen months ago, had made a point of   
   apprising Roosevelt of aspects of    
   the naval war kept secret from others outside the British government.   
   Churchill and Roosevelt wrote each other several times a week; they spoke by   
   telephone less often but still regularly.   
      
   An inside account of the war was the least the prime minister could provide,   
   as Roosevelt was furnishing Churchill and the British the arms and equipment   
   that kept their struggle against Germany alive. Until now Roosevelt had left   
   the actual fighting to    
   the British, but he made certain they got what they needed to remain in the   
   battle.   
      
   The situation might change at any moment, though, the Sunday papers implied.   
   The Navy Department–which was to say, Roosevelt–had just ordered the   
   seizure of Finnish vessels in American ports, on the ground that Finland had   
   become a de facto member of    
   the Axis alliance. Navy secretary Frank Knox, reporting to Congress on the war   
   readiness of the American fleet, assured the legislators that it was   
   “second to none.” Yet it still wasn’t strong enough, Knox said. “The   
   international situation is    
   such that we must arm as rapidly as possible to meet our naval defense   
   requirements simultaneously in both oceans against any possible combination of   
   powers concerting against us.”   
      
   Roosevelt read these remarks with satisfaction. The president had long prided   
   himself on clever appointments, but no appointment had tickled him more than   
   his tapping of Knox, a Republican from the stronghold of American   
   isolationism, Chicago. By    
   reaching out to the Republicans–not once but twice: at the same time that he   
   chose Knox, Roosevelt named Republican Henry Stimson secretary of war–the   
   president signaled a desire for a bipar­tisan foreign policy. By picking a   
   Chicagoan, Roosevelt    
   poked a finger in the eye of the arch- isolationist Chicago Tribune, a poke   
   that hurt the more as Knox was the publisher of the rival Chicago Daily News.   
      
   Roosevelt might have chuckled to himself again, reflecting on how he had cut   
   the ground from under the isolationists, one square foot at a time; but the   
   recent developments were no laughing matter. Four years had passed since his   
   “quarantine” speech    
   in Chicago, which had warned against German and Japanese aggression. The   
   strength of the isolationists had prevented him from following up at that   
   time, or for many months thereafter. But by reiterating his message again and   
   again–and with the help of    
   Hitler and the Japanese, who repeatedly proved him right–he gradually   
   brought the American people around to his way of thinking. He persuaded   
   Congress to amend America’s neutrality laws and to let the democracies   
   purchase American weapons for use    
   against the fascists. He sent American destroyers to Britain to keep the sea   
   lanes open. His greatest coup was Lend- Lease, the program that made Amer­ica   
   the armory of the anti- fascist alliance. He had done everything but ask   
   Congress to declare war.    
   The Sunday papers thought this final step might come soon. He knew more than   
   the papers did, and he thought so, too.   
      
      
   ***   
      
      
   But there was something he didn’t know, or even imagine. Roosevelt was still   
   reading the papers when an American minesweeper on a predawn patrol two miles   
   off the southern coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, near the entrance to   
   Pearl Harbor, spotted    
   what looked like a periscope. No Amer­ican submarines were supposed to be in   
   the area, and the minesweeper reported the sighting to its backup, the   
   destroyer Ward. The report provoked little alarm, partly because Hawaii was so   
   far from Japan and partly    
   because Pearl Harbor’s shallow bottom seemed sufficient protection against   
   enemy subs. Some officers on the Ward questioned the sighting; eyes play   
   tricks in the dark. Perhaps there was an American sub in the area; this   
   wouldn’t have been the fi   
   rst time overzealous security or a simple screwup had prevented information   
   from reaching the patrols. In any event, the Ward responded slowly to the   
   asserted sighting and spent most of the next two hours cruising the area and   
   discovering nothing.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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