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“This means war”
SOON AFTER Roosevelt retreated to his study, he was joined by his close friend Harry Hopkins, who would shadow the president for the next twenty-four hours. Like most chief executives, FDR often found the presidency a lonely position that left him surrounded by people who always wanted something from him. Over time, FDR learned to be suspicious of the senior members of his own administration. When he needed to relax, FDR often turned to old friends and relatives who had no connection to government. Hopkins was the exception: By all accounts, he and Roosevelt shared a special bond that endured until the day FDR died.1
Harry Hopkins, born in Iowa in 1890, became a social worker in New York City after graduating from Grinnell College. After the onset of the Great Depression, Hopkins took a position as head of New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hopkins followed Roosevelt to Washington after the 1932 election and spent the next few years developing ingenious new ways to spend the nation’s money. He headed up a series of New Deal alphabet-soup agencies designed to provide work and relief to struggling families: the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Over the years, the two men formed a close bond. Hopkins understood Roosevelt’s moods. He knew the appropriate time to talk business and when his boss needed to relax. He had an instinctive feel for when he could push FDR and when it was time to back off. His real talent was in turning Roosevelt’s vague ideas into concrete programs. Hopkins was not a big thinker or a political visionary. He divided people into two groups: “talkers” and “doers.” Hopkins was the consummate “doer.” He knew how to move the bureaucracy and help FDR achieve his goals. Above all else, Roosevelt knew that Hopkins would protect his interests and remain totally discreet in the process. As Roosevelt’s friend and speechwriter Robert Sherwood noted, “Hopkins made it his job, he made it his religion, to find out just what it was that Roosevelt really wanted and then to see to it that neither hell nor high water, nor even possible vacillations by Roosevelt himself, blocked its achievement.”2
Although Hopkins won the president’s trust and friendship, by 1935 he had alienated powerful members of Congress and found himself at odds with more conservative members of the administration who were pushing Roosevelt to scale back spending. “He was regarded as a sinister figure by all of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s enemies and by many of Roosevelt’s most loyal friends,” Sherwood noted. People resented his enormous power and his privileged access to the president. When questioned by Republican presidential hopeful Wendell Willkie about why he kept Hopkins around, Roosevelt responded, “Someday you may well be sitting here where I am now as President of the United States. And when you are, you’ll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through it wants something out of you. You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing except to serve you.”3
In 1937, a few weeks after his wife died, Hopkins was diagnosed with stomach cancer and had a large portion of his intestines removed. The surgery eradicated the cancer, but it also prevented him from properly digesting food, leaving him shockingly thin. FDR jokingly referred to him as “the half man” because of his sickly, frail appearance.4
In December 1938, Roosevelt appointed Hopkins secretary of commerce, but Hopkins was too sick to work. He spent months at the Mayo Clinic, but his condition was grave. “The doctors have given Harry up for dead,” Roosevelt told friends. Unwilling to let his friend go without a fight, FDR intervened and had Hopkins transferred to Washington, where navy physicians managed to save his life. Hopkins offered the president his resignation, but FDR refused to accept it, saying, “Why you’ll be back in your office in a couple of weeks and going great guns!” The recovery was slow, however, and Hopkins remained very sick and largely bedridden for months.5
In May 1940, Hopkins mustered the strength to attend dinner at the White House. He looked awful and felt worse. Roosevelt was so concerned that he told him to spend the night. He would call the White House his home for the next three and a half years. “It was Harry Hopkins who gave George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart the idea for that play of theirs, ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner,’” quipped Grace Tully. Hopkins lived in the Lincoln Suite, which consisted of a large bedroom with a four-post bed, a small sitting room, and a bath. The room was just two doors down the hall from FDR. His daughter, Diana, moved into a bedroom on the third floor.6
With a room down the hall from the president’s private study, Hopkins needed no appointment to stroll down and discuss events with Roosevelt. After breakfast, numerous times throughout the day, and often in the evenings after dinner, he would casually saunter into the president’s study and talk over the day’s news. They enjoyed the same kind of humor, poking fun at other officials and telling off-color jokes. Often in the evening the two men could be heard laughing from inside the president’s private study. Most of all, they were both staunch liberals and devoted internationalists.
By the winter of 1941, Hopkins appeared a ghost of a man. A friend once described his physical appearance as being akin to “an ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day.” But he refused to let his deteriorating health slow him down. He smoked four packs of Lucky Strikes a day. He also loved the racetrack, always betting at the two-dollar window. He enjoyed the company of women. Frequent nightlong soirees at various clubs and bars earned him the reputation as a playboy. “Our biggest job is to keep Harry from ever feeling completely well,” said the White House physician, Admiral Ross T. McIntire. “When he thinks he’s restored to health he goes out on the town—and from there to the Mayo Clinic.”7
Roosevelt trusted Hopkins more than his own State Department. Beginning in 1940, after Hopkins left the Commerce Department, Roosevelt gave him the title of special assistant to the president and used him as a private envoy. Roosevelt trusted Hopkins to lead delicate diplomatic missions, communicate messages, and gather intelligence. In the spring of 1941, FDR sent him as a special envoy to Winston Churchill. FDR wanted to assess British morale and offer assurance that America would be sending aid. Churchill, who, like Roosevelt, appreciated Hopkins’s ability to zero in on a problem, nicknamed him “Lord Root of the Matter.” Despite fragile health that required frequent stays in the hospital, Hopkins continued in this role of amateur diplomat while cementing his position as Roosevelt’s alter ego.
At 9:30 p.m. on December 6, Lieutenant Lester Schulz arrived at the White House with a locked pouch containing a top-secret document. The pouch contained thirteen parts of the fourteen-part Japanese reply to the hard-line U.S. proposal that Hull had presented to Japan in November. The messages had been sent from Tokyo to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, but had been intercepted by American intelligence. The United States had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code, nicknamed “Purple,” in August 1940. American officials had been reading the messages before the diplomats received them, which meant that Roosevelt had the advantage of knowing what the Japanese government was doing and saying for the sixteen months before Pearl Harbor. They had not, however, cracked the military code, so while the U.S. government was aware of Japan’s diplomatic maneuvering, it remained in the dark about the specific movements of Tokyo’s navy.
As Hopkins paced back and forth, Roosevelt read the fifteen typewritten pages carefully for about ten minutes. Most of the document outlined Japan’s peaceful intentions in the region and laid blame for the rising tensions on the United States. There was still a critical fourteenth part missing, but the final section of this document announced there was no chance of reaching a diplomatic settlement with the United States “because of American attitudes.” As he finished, FDR turned to his trusted adviser. “This means war,” he said.
Despite his dramatic comment, FDR most likely did not believe that the message signaled an imminent thre
at to American bases in the Pacific. It meant that war would come sooner than expected, and it would likely be precipitated by a Japanese attack on British, or possibly Dutch, possessions somewhere in the region.
Hopkins agreed and suggested to FDR that perhaps the United States should launch a preemptive strike. “Since war was undoubtedly going to come at the convenience of the Japanese,” Hopkins noted, “it was too bad that we could not strike the first blow and prevent any sort of surprise.” Roosevelt, like Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, understood the political appeal of having the enemy fire the first shot. “No,” he said, “we can’t do that. We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” He raised his voice and said, “But we have a good record.” Schulz, who waited in the study until the president finished reading the document, understood Roosevelt’s comments to mean that the United States would have to wait. “The impression that I got was that we would have to stand on that record, we could not make the first overt move. We would have to wait until it came.”8
Roosevelt wanted to alert the navy as quickly as possible. It was important that the navy be on alert, prepared for a possible Japanese move. He tried to reach Admiral Stark, who was attending a revival of Sigmund Romberg’s Student Prince. Fearing that summoning the admiral from a public theater might cause “undue alarm,” Roosevelt waited until shortly before midnight to pass along the warning.
Roosevelt may have been alarmed by the message, but his foreign policy advisers did not share his concern. Stark, who read the message after returning home from the theater, later testified before the Navy Court of Inquiry that he, too, was convinced that war was inevitable. But he believed that the commanders in Hawaii had already been sufficiently warned about the prospect of hostilities, and he saw nothing in the thirteen-part message that suggested an imminent threat to the United States. “I thought she was more likely to strike in the Philippines than elsewhere, so far as United States territory is concerned.”9
That evening, a messenger also brought the decoded thirteen-part Japanese message to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox at his Wardman Park home on Connecticut Avenue. While Knox read the pages in silence, Mrs. Knox told the messenger that she was hoping that her exhausted husband could take the next day off and “sleep around the clock.” Knox, seeing nothing new in the message, decided to wait until the following morning to discuss it with Stimson and Hull. There was still a missing fourteenth part to the message. Knox hoped that the complete message would be available at that time and they would know Japan’s intent.10
Aides to Secretary Hull and General Marshall, who also received the thirteen-part message that evening, did not see any reason to disturb their bosses with the new information on a Saturday night. An aide to Hull read the thirteen-part message and concluded it had “little military significance.” He promised to show it to the secretary in the morning.11
FDR was still in bed on Sunday morning when he received notice that his military aide, Admiral John Beardall, would be bringing the locked pouch containing the fourteenth part of Japan’s diplomatic message. Beardall delivered the pouch to the president at 10:00 a.m. and waited patiently while FDR read it. It contained the missing fourteenth part of the message that began arriving the previous evening. It stated that the chances of achieving peace in the Pacific “through cooperation of the American Government” had “been lost.”
The pouch likely also contained a second message that instructed the Japanese ambassador to destroy the code machines at their Washington embassy and to deliver the message to the secretary of state at one o’clock. But if these instructions were included in the package that FDR read, he apparently was not alarmed. After reading the materials, the president turned to the admiral and said, “It looks as though they are breaking off negotiations.” It was obvious to FDR that the Japanese were planning to strike, but when? And where? There was nothing that suggested to him that an American installation would be a target.12
Roosevelt confronted a dilemma: The Japanese response made clear they were breaking off diplomatic relations and were likely to strike Allied possessions in the Pacific. He assumed that the likely target would be either British Malaya or the Dutch East Indies. Without American intervention, the Japanese could control a vast area that was rich in natural resources that stretched from the Aleutian Islands to India. This aggression would strengthen the Japanese war machine and make them a more formidable enemy for the United States. It would also weaken the British, forcing them to expend precious resources to protect their colonial possessions that could be better used to fight Hitler.
Although a Japanese offensive against British possessions would present a long-term danger to the United States, FDR doubted if he could motivate the nation to go to war to save British imperial land in the Pacific. Congress had only reluctantly agreed to support FDR’s efforts to defend Britain. As Sherwood noted, “Why, then, should Americans die for Thailand, or for such outposts of British imperialism as Singapore or Hong Kong or of Dutch imperialism in the East Indies, or for Communism in Vladivostok?”13
Even if the president were to muster all of his political skills, a congressional debate over war could drag on for weeks. FDR had been warning the American people about the danger in the Atlantic and the need to support Britain. How could he now convince them to go to war in the Pacific? Much of his rhetoric had been focused on convincing Americans to supply aid to Britain so that American soldiers would not have to fight and die in another foreign war. He was reluctant to abandon that message or to remove the focus from the war in Europe.14
The hawkish Stimson and Hull were pondering the same question on Sunday morning at their 10:00 a.m. meeting. “Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry and we are all wondering where the blow will strike,” Stimson noted in his diary. Like Roosevelt, they were convinced that the likely target would be British, not American. One question persisted: What should the United States do if the Japanese attacked Singapore, Malaysia, or Thailand? Stimson and Hull were convinced that the United States needed to join the British if a fight erupted. But they clearly wondered whether Roosevelt would agree.
The possibility that Japan would strike America or its possessions seemed remote to all. The day before, while holding his daily briefing with civilian aides and military chiefs, Knox had reviewed all the intelligence information. Reports claimed that a large Japanese task force was at sea, apparently headed along the south coast of Indochina. “Gentlemen,” Knox asked, “are they going to hit us?’” His advisers were unanimous in their response. “No, Mr. Secretary,” declared Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who was in charge of war planning for the navy. “They are going to attack the British. They are not ready for us yet.” As a naval aide noted, “There was no dissenting voice. Turner’s concise statement apparently represented the thinking of the Navy Department.”15
And so in the hours before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR’s main foreign policy advisers were busy developing a strategy for getting him to declare war against Japan if it attacked either a British or a Dutch possession. Knox dictated a memorandum that urged the president to recognize that “any threat to any one of the three of us is a threat to all of us.” As Knox later told a congressional committee investigating the attack, his goal was to convince Roosevelt to state that the United States would respond by force if the Japanese attacked Thailand or “British, Dutch, United States, Free French, or Portuguese territory in the Pacific area.”16
At the Munitions Building on Independence Avenue in Washington, Colonel Rufus Bratton, an intelligence aide to General Marshall, was not alarmed by the official fourteen-part Japanese response. He was, however, stunned when he read the second cable instructing Japan’s ambassadors to present the message to the secretary of state at precisely 1:00 p.m. and to destroy their code machines. He believed that it was an “activating” intercept. The 1:00 p.m. message convinced him that the Japanese were planning to strike near dawn somewhere in the Pacific.17
; Bratton urgently tried reaching General Marshall, who was out riding his horse. Bratton had to settle for leaving a message with Marshall’s orderly. “Please go out at once, get assistance if necessary, and find General Marshall,” he pleaded.18
Marshall returned to his office at 11:25 a.m. and began carefully poring over the entire fourteen-part message. After finishing, he looked up at his aides and asked whether they saw any significance in the instruction to present the message at 1:00. Bratton said he “thought it probable that the Japanese line of action would be into Thailand but that it might be into any one or more of a number of other areas.” Marshall’s aides recommended that all American outposts in the Pacific and on the West Coast be notified before the 1:00 p.m. deadline.19
General Marshall then called Admiral Stark and told him that he was planning to send a warning message to army posts in the Pacific and the Panama Canal region and asked whether he planned to send one to the navy. Stark told him that he felt that the navy had already been provided sufficient warning of a possible attack, and he felt no reason to send a new one. Marshall then started scribbling out his message: “Japanese are presenting at one pm eastern standard time today what amounts to an ultimatum. Also, they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on alert accordingly.” While he was writing the message, Stark had a change of mind and called Marshall back, agreeing that naval authorities should be sent the same message. Marshall added to his message: “Inform naval authorities of this communication.”20
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