The news had already been broadcast over the radio, but apparently few in the audience had heard it. A series of speakers rose to the podium to denounce Roosevelt. Among them, a state senator called Roosevelt “the chief warmonger in the U.S.” Sitting in the back row was a plainclothes member of the Pittsburgh Reserve, Colonel Enrique Urrutia Jr. He knew of the attack and grew increasingly agitated by the partisan jabs. At one point, he stood up and asked whether this was the appropriate time to be making these comments. “Can this meeting be called after what has happened in the last few hours?” he shouted. “Do you know that Japan has attacked Manila, that Japan has attacked Hawaii?”25
The head of the America First chapter claimed that Urrutia was “speaking in broken English” and that it “was very difficult to understand what he was trying to say.” Many in the crowd, however, seemed to understand him perfectly. They booed him, called him a “warmonger,” and shouted, “Throw him out!” Some started to get physical. When an angry group of men moved toward Urrutia, the police intervened and rescued him. “I came to listen,” Urrutia told a reporter afterward. “I thought this was a patriots meeting, but this is a traitors meeting.”26
After the incident, Nye strutted to the platform as if nothing had happened. For nearly forty-five minutes he gave his standard isolationist speech. “Whose war is this?” he asked. The crowd chanted, “Roosevelt’s.” During his speech, Hagy received word from his editor that Japan had declared war on the United States. He wanted to get Nye’s reaction, so he wrote on a piece of paper, “The Japanese Imperial Government at Tokyo today at 4 p.m. announced a state of war with the U.S. and Great Britain.” He walked onto the platform and handed it to Nye. The senator paused to look at it and then proceeded with his rant for another thirty minutes.27
Finally, at 5:45 p.m., Nye reluctantly acknowledged the news. “I have before me the worst news that I have encountered in the last 20 years.” He then proceeded to read the note to the crowd. “I can’t somehow believe this,” he concluded.
Later that night a defeated and dejected Nye spoke before a crowd of six hundred people at the First Baptist Church. He reviewed the events that led to the war while accusing Roosevelt of “doing his utmost to promote trouble with Japan.” Resigned to the reality of war, he could not resist taking one more swipe at Roosevelt. “We have been maneuvered into this by the President,” he insisted, “but the only thing now is to declare war and to jump into it with everything we have and bring it to a victorious conclusion.”28
11
“I will go down in disgrace”
AT 6:40, FDR returned to his study, where he tried to enjoy a quiet dinner with Harry Hopkins and Grace Tully. The White House kitchen set up trays of food. The president ate at his desk, and Tully and Hopkins sat on the leather sofas, resting their trays on folding card tables. Roosevelt did not want to talk about Pearl Harbor, but it was difficult to ignore. “For the life of me I can’t remember what we ate but I do remember the Boss was happy to have a few quiet minutes before the evening meetings,” Tully recalled.1
The attack on Pearl Harbor represented the opening salvo in a breathtaking Japanese offensive. Three hours after the assault on Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes appeared in the skies above the island of Guam. Attacks on Thailand followed. At 3:00 p.m., Japan launched its first attacks against Singapore. Forty minutes later, Japanese planes bombed Khota Baru in British Malaya. Before the day was over, Japanese forces would assault Hong Kong, the Midway Islands, Wake Island, and the Philippines.2
By early evening, Roosevelt still did not have a full picture of the breadth of Japanese aggression. It is difficult to know precisely when FDR learned about the various offensives, but in the original draft of his speech, which he dictated around 5:00 p.m., FDR referenced only the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Malaya. Right after returning from his medical treatment with McIntire, FDR received a report from the Navy Department that Guam was under attack.3
More bad news was coming, but for now FDR seemed overwhelmed by the potential consequences of Pearl Harbor. Over dinner, FDR shared his private fears about the day’s events with Tully and Hopkins. With the Pearl Harbor fleet destroyed, there was nothing stopping Japan’s navy from invading and capturing the Hawaiian Islands. Perhaps more frightening, he acknowledged that Japan could invade Los Angeles or San Francisco. Given the poor state of American readiness, he speculated that an invading army could advance as far east as Chicago.
It was also not clear to Roosevelt that evening how the attack would play out politically. He planned to keep tight control of information about the destruction and casualties, but eventually this information would leak. Would the nation blame him for the disaster? White House butler Alonzo Fields recalled overhearing Roosevelt say, “My God, how did it happen? I will go down in disgrace.”4
While reports of other Japanese offensives were coming in, FDR was most interested in getting updates from Admiral Stark about Pearl Harbor. According to Hopkins, “Stark continued to get further and always more dismal news about the attack on Hawaii.”5
It seems likely that Stark passed along information that he received during a 7:10 update from Admiral Bloch. “Here in the harbor, as nearly as I can ascertain there are six battleships out of business,” Bloch said as a stenographer took careful notes. “Six battleships, and three of them, at least, look like they are salvage jobs.” Bloch provided a detailed description of the damage suffered by each of the ships. “The Nevada was hit by a torpedo and set on fire.... The Oklahoma was hit by three torpedoes . . . and she was capsized.” The Tennessee was “partially capsized.” The California “was set on fire and she is burning.” The Arizona “was hit by torpedoes or aerial bombs and she . . . is capsized.” The West Virginia “is still afloat and all right, but pretty badly damaged by fire.” The Helena had “a crack under her water line and her fire rooms are flooded.” Crews pumped so much water into the Raleigh to put out a fire that “she is in bad shape.”6
Bloch said that all available planes, along with two task forces, had “gone out to look for these fellows” who had attacked Pearl. But he cautioned that the army had lost a lot of pursuit planes. “They lost one squadron, I heard.” He noted that Guam was under attack by two squadrons of Japanese fighters, and there were unconfirmed reports of parachute troops landing on the island. When he told Stark that the United States had sunk three enemy submarines, including one inside the harbor, Stark responded, “The submarine sunk in the harbor, is it German?” Block responded that he did not “know what it is as yet.”7
Both men seemed to believe that the Japanese ships were still off the coast of Hawaii and possibly preparing for a land invasion the following morning. “I prophesized that there might be a raid in the morning,” Stark said. Bloch, who was “expecting attacks on Wake and Midway,” summed up the situation: “It’s a pretty bad mess here. Of course they came in with no warning at all. They did their job very efficiently.”8
It is likely that Roosevelt also received an update on the Philippines at some point during his dinner. The army finally got General MacArthur on the line at 7:00 p.m. in Washington (about 8:00 a.m., December 8, in Manila). The general acknowledged receiving the reports that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. In Washington, General Leonard Gerow, calling on behalf of Marshall, warned MacArthur of the possibility of an imminent Japanese offensive. “Report immediately any Japanese operations or any indications,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you got an attack there in the near future.” To underscore the point, Gerow repeated the last sentence. MacArthur assured the general that he was prepared and asked him to pass along a message to Marshall that “our tails are up in the air.”9
Although it must have been reassuring that Manila had not been attacked, there was little doubt in Washington that the islands were going to be targeted at some point. (Indeed, although they did not know it at the time, the Japanese had been planning a dawn attack that morning but had been stymied by heavy fog on Formosa, from which th
e planes were to have been launched.) MacArthur’s air force commander had placed his forces on alert as soon as he learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he requested permission to launch a preemptive strike against Japanese positions in Formosa. MacArthur, however, vetoed the idea, saying, “We couldn’t attack until we were attacked.”10
Shortly after 10:00 a.m. on the morning of December 8, the skies over Formosa cleared, allowing Japan’s military commanders to launch their force of 108 bombers and 84 Zeros. By 11:30 a.m., radar crews in the Philippines started tracking a large echo approaching Luzon from the north. Before noon, MacArthur received the first reports that Japanese bombers had assaulted Baguio in northern Luzon, along with Iba, Tuguegarao, and Tarlac. Finally, a stunned and apparently disoriented MacArthur gave permission to attack Formosa. But the order came too late. At 12:20 p.m., while crews were fueling the planes and loading them with bombs, a fleet of Japanese fighters and bombers appeared overhead.
Over the next hour, Japanese fighters strafed buildings and planes while bombers dropped their deadly cargo. When the attack ended, nearly 100 American aircraft had been destroyed, including a dozen B-17 bombers. More than 80 men were killed and another 150 wounded. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Japan found another surprised and unprepared American military outpost ripe for destruction.11
Reports of a Japanese move against the Philippines would start trickling into the White House late on Sunday evening, but FDR would not learn the full extent of the military disaster until the following morning.
In addition to getting information from military officials around the world, White House staff were listening to reports on the radio and checking with other news sources. At 6:11 p.m., the Associated Press, citing a source in Tokyo, stated there was one Japanese aircraft carrier near Hawaii. That was followed by repeated claims of invading Japanese troops. At 8:35 p.m., the army stated that troops were landing on the west coast of Oahu. There were also claims that two enemy aircraft carriers had been sunk: one in the Pacific, the other off the coast of an unspecified Latin American country.
These stories were mixed with accurate accounts of Japanese planes over Wake Island and Guam, along with a 5:20 p.m. announcement that Japan declared that a state of war existed with the United States and Great Britain. At 8:06, military intelligence confirmed the assault on Singapore and heavy fighting at Kota Bharu near British Malay. Later that evening, Roosevelt complained about the conflicting information that he was receiving and how difficult it was to sort fact from fiction.12
Roosevelt liked telling the story about the time the poet Carl Sandburg came to visit him. Sandburg, who was writing his magisterial biography of Abraham Lincoln, asked FDR what window Lincoln had looked out to see the smoke of Confederate cannons across the Potomac. Roosevelt did not know, but he invited Sandburg to tour the second floor and decide for himself. Sandburg stopped at the center window of the Oval Study and, according to FDR, “stood there silently for about ten minutes.” FDR, not wanting to disturb him, shuffled some papers. “Yes,” Sandburg finally said, “that’s the one—the center window.” When Roosevelt asked how he knew for sure, the poet responded, “I felt it.”13
If Roosevelt looked out the three large windows of his study, he would have seen the same sweep of the Potomac that Abraham Lincoln saw on the eve of the Civil War and that Woodrow Wilson stared out at in the days leading up to World War I. FDR seemed mindful of the lessons of both wars in the months leading up to December 7. Like Lincoln, while viewing war as inevitable, he understood the moral and psychological advantage of having the enemy fire the first shot. He had not anticipated that the first shot would cripple the Pacific Fleet, but he now planned to mold public outrage to his war goals. He was determined to avoid the mistake that Wilson made, turning his war into a crusade for democracy, only to have the initial idealism and enthusiasm turn to despair and disillusion when the realities of battle settled in.
FDR walked a delicate line in the hours after Pearl Harbor: He needed to use the attack to justify declaring war against Japan, but he wanted to avoid providing the public with details of the devastation. Perhaps Roosevelt worried that the specifics would demoralize the nation, allowing his enemies to blame his administration for the glaring security lapse. It is also likely that FDR feared that arousing too much passion would undermine his larger strategic goals. He wanted to transform anger at Japan’s actions in the Pacific into a mandate to enter the war against Germany in Europe.
Whatever steps he decided to take, the president realized that he needed to remain mindful of public opinion. FDR, who possessed an instinctive feel for the national mood, probably appreciated the crosscurrents that engulfed the nation that evening.
While strong undercurrents of anxiety and fear gripped Hawaii and the West Coast, the hundreds of telegrams that poured into the White House that evening revealed the outrage and resolve of a nation prepared to follow his leadership. Governors, mayors, local city councils, civic organizations, and ordinary citizens took the time to send telegrams to the White House expressing their outrage at the attacks and their unqualified support for any response he ordered. For the first time since the early days of the New Deal, FDR confronted a unified nation devoid of political differences and desperately looking for him to take charge.
The governors, Democrats and Republicans, of nearly every state sent messages of support to the White House. “There is imperative need for courageous unified action by the American people,” wrote his vanquished 1936 election opponent, Alf Landon. “Please command me in any way I can be of service.” Kentucky governor Keen Johnson wrote that the people of his state believed it was an “outrage” that Japan responded to the president’s peace overtures by launching a brutal surprise attack. “As governor of Kentucky I assure you people of this state are prepared to follow your leadership and make any sacrifice you regard necessary to meet emergency.” The governor of Alabama, Frank M. Dixon, echoed the sentiment of most elected officials when he wrote, “In this crisis you can be assured that the people of Alabama are behind you and that you will have their united support in whatever decisions you may reach for the good of the nation.”14
Touching letters from private citizens also flooded into the White House. A mother from Lancaster, California, told the president of the great sacrifice she was willing to offer to the war effort. “I have very little to offer,” she wrote, but she was willing to part with “the only thing I have on this earth . . . one son, whom I love excessively.” She noted that as war seemed imminent, he now “belongs to America.”15
Many people living in the Washington, D.C., area chose a more visible demonstration of their support. By the evening of December 7, a large crowd had gathered outside the White House. “The night was chilly and a cold damp wind swept in from the Potomac,” observed Merriman Smith, “but the shivering crowds remained.” They broke into a spontaneous rendition of “God Bless America” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” “The words and music were faltering at first,” Smith noted, “but swelled up strong.” Smith wondered if FDR “could hear those unrehearsed songs coming spontaneously and from the hearts of the little people across his back lawn.”16
12
“Deadly calm”
AT 6:30 ON Sunday evening, as FDR was being wheeled up from his doctor’s appointment back to his study for dinner, Eleanor Roosevelt was entering the NBC studios in Washington. Two months earlier, in October 1941, Eleanor had agreed to host a regular Sunday-evening radio show sponsored by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau. The show provided her with a forum to discuss issues impacting American women. The first lady could have used the attack on Pearl Harbor as an excuse to cancel her scheduled appearance on December 7. Instead, she decided to use the occasion to speak to the American public. She crafted her own remarks, and there is no evidence that she cleared them with her husband, or with anyone else in the White House.
On the day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, Eleanor Roosevelt had resolutely
gone about her schedule. She had organized a large lunch party with thirty-one guests in the White House Blue Room for 1:00 p.m. One of the guests, Mrs. Charles Hamlin, recalled that “Eleanor was quite a little late in joining us and she seemed a bit flustered as she told us she was so sorry but the news from Japan was very bad” and that her husband would not be able to join them. “It was while we were at that luncheon that the bombardment of Pearl Harbour took place,” she reflected, although no one was aware of it at the time.1
At 2:40 p.m., after saying good-bye to her guests, Eleanor made her way back upstairs to her sitting room on the second floor. As she passed by Franklin’s study, she saw all of the commotion and knew that something awful had happened. “All the secretaries were there, two telephones were in use, the senior military aides were on their way with messages. I said nothing because the words I heard over the telephone were quite sufficient to tell me that finally the blow had fallen and we had been attacked.” Realizing that FDR was too busy, she decided not to interrupt him.2
Later that afternoon when she peeked into his office, she noticed his “deadly calm.” It was a calm she had witnessed before, a part of his character that had developed over years of struggle against a body that had betrayed him. The roots of Roosevelt’s emotional strength trace back to his childhood, but his struggle to return to public life after being diagnosed with polio added a new dimension to his character. It is impossible to appreciate FDR’s calm and deliberate leadership on December 7, 1941, without understanding how his background shaped his temperament. Polio would also transform the relationship between Franklin and Eleanor, allowing them to forge a unique private and public partnership that would shape the times in which they lived.
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