Pearl Harbor

Table of Contents

 

 

 

More Advance Praise for
Pearl Harbor

“Steve Gillon begins his dramatic tale after the final bombs exploded on December 7, 1941. As President Roosevelt gathered information, he began preparing for his greatest moment, when with one speech he would have to unify the Americans and take them into war. We know what happened. But as Gillon demonstrates, we don't know the whole story. In a book that reads like the best fictional political thriller, he takes the reader on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour hell of a ride.”

 

“In this compelling account of the day that will live in infamy, Steven Gillon brilliantly evokes the peaceable White House and unprepared nation that were thrown into chaos and confusion on 7 December 1941. Gillon highlights the ‘deadly calm' with which Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and set the United States on course to be a military and economic superpower.”

 

“In this fascinating account of the first 24 hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Steven Gillon manages to capture not only the essence of perhaps the most critical day in twentieth century American history; but also the essence of the man who stood at the center of it all—Franklin D. Roosevelt. A brilliant piece of investigative history,
Pearl Harbor
tells us a great deal about the character of the President who, though unable to walk unaided, brought the United States safely through the two great crises of the modern era, the Great Depression and World War Two. This is a must read for anyone who wishes to gain a complete understanding of FDR and the nation he led.”

 

“In
Pearl Harbor
Steve Gillon combines impeccable research and historical authority with a narrative so gripping that the book reads like a thriller. This blow-by-blow account of the first 24 hours after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor presents not only a new and detailed version of the reaction to the event but also a new and up-close vision of FDR's leadership.”

ALSO BY STEVEN M. GILLON

PREFACE

President Franklin D. Roosevelt learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at 1:47 p.m. on December 7, 1941. By that time the following day, FDR had finished delivering his war message to a joint session of Congress. It is hard to think of any other twenty-four-hour period that so radically transformed America and its role in the world. Japan's assault on a quiet Sunday morning transformed a precarious peace into a total war. In this incredibly short frame of time, one era ended and a new one began. Pearl Harbor was the defining event of the twentieth century—it changed the global balance of power, set the stage for the Cold War, and allowed the United States to emerge as a global superpower.

There is no shortage of books about Pearl Harbor or about Franklin Roosevelt, but there is surprisingly little written about how FDR responded in the hours immediately after the attack. The standard accounts of Pearl Harbor focus on the broad diplomatic, military, and political forces that conspired to produce the worst military failure in American history. They explain why the attack took place, trace the failure of American intelligence, and depict the nature of the carnage in Hawaii. But because they are painted on such a broad canvas, many of these panoramic accounts have little room to offer an intimate glimpse into the nature of Roosevelt's leadership in the hours that followed.

Even the finest Roosevelt biographers move quickly from the moment that FDR learned of the bombing to his war message the following day. In
FDR: The War President
, Kenneth Davis fills 804 pages with details of the Roosevelt presidency between the years 1940 and 1943,
but he devotes only 5 pages to the twenty-four hours following the attack. Likewise, Doris Kearns Goodwin dedicates only a few paragraphs to the day's events in her Pulitzer Prize–winning
No Ordinary Time
.

Focusing on the first twenty-four hours of crisis allows me to tell familiar stories in an unfamiliar way and provide a new perspective on the inner workings of the presidency. It is based on the belief that the first twenty-four hours are critical to understanding the nature of leadership. It is during those first few hours that the die is cast. Those hours represent a test of presidential character. Dependable information is scarce. Situations are fluid, changing by the minute. A president has little time for reflection. Decisions need to be made. Process is abandoned. It all comes down to the judgment and instincts of one man, forced by circumstance to make momentous decisions that can alter the course of history.

Writing about “great men” has fallen out of favor among many professional historians, but events like Pearl Harbor remind us of the centrality of presidential leadership. While there are impersonal forces that shape the tide of history, there are also defining moments when individuals matter. Pearl Harbor was one of those defining moments.

History in macrocosm often appears more coherent than it actually is; in microcosm, contingency, uncertainty, and luck—both good and bad—play much larger roles than we might like to acknowledge. We think of the commander in chief as presiding over a vast and sophisticated communications system. But on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, intelligence was scarce and difficult to obtain. How big was the Japanese force? How much damage did it inflict? Did the U.S. Navy, which FDR believed was on full alert, anticipate the attack and manage to repel the invaders? Initially, military officials in Hawaii were reluctant to give details of the damage assessment, even to the president, because they could not find a secure line and worried about Japanese eavesdropping. Much of the information they did provide—that some of the planes had swastikas painted on them, for example—would later be proved false.

It is against this backdrop of confusion and chaos that FDR's leadership must be judged. FDR was forced to make every major decision based on instinct and his own strategic sense of right and wrong. There were no instant surveys to guide his actions, no twenty-four-hour television coverage offering him a glimpse into the national mood. Making matters worse, the president's advisers were anxious and divided.

Although he lacked accurate information, Roosevelt exercised enormous power in the hours and days that followed the attack. While the entire nation looked to the White House for leadership, partisan differences disappeared, and former isolationists began clamoring for war. Roosevelt exercised nearly complete control over the flow of information. With the exception of a few radio reports that made it to the mainland, there was little or no independent information about events in Hawaii. All the major news outlets rushed to the White House to find out what had happened. As
Newsweek
reported that week, “The White House was the only funnel for information.”
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One of the extraordinary aspects of the hours after Pearl Harbor was Roosevelt's ability to manage the news in the wake of the attack. Unlike the Kennedy assassination, or the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when television spread the word around the country and the globe within minutes, news about Pearl Harbor spread slowly, trickling out over the radio in the afternoon. The attack took place during the traditional Sunday dinner hour on the East Coast and in the Midwest, which meant that most people did not have their radios on. The unseasonably warm weather across the nation drove many people outside, and away from their radios, for picnics and other activities. It was not until later in the afternoon, when the “extra” editions of daily newspapers hit the streets with their screaming headlines, that the entire nation learned of the assault.

Nonetheless, FDR was still able to deceive the public and Congress about the extent of the carnage. Although the president had detailed damage and casualty reports by the end of the day, he refused to release them—not only to the press but also to lawmakers in Washington. He
deliberately downplayed the effectiveness of the Japanese attack when he met with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders on the evening of December 7.

There were good reasons for FDR to be deceptive: He worried that if the Japanese realized what a devastating blow they had delivered, they would launch a land assault against Hawaii. He also needed to maintain public morale and feared details of the devastation could panic the American people. Based on comments he made that evening, it seems that FDR also worried that the public would blame him for the disaster, undermining his authority when he needed it most to rally the nation behind him. It is revealing that Roosevelt's successful leadership depended on a level of deception that would be unacceptable by today's standards.

There is, however, no evidence that FDR deceived lawmakers or the American public about a critical and much-contested point surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack: the fact that it came as a surprise. The public's fascination with conspiracy theories has distorted much of the writing about Pearl Harbor. The conspiracy theories popped up even before the war was over, with the appearance of John Flynn's self-published
The Truth About Pearl Harbor
, and they have continued up to the present, with the 1999 release of Robert B. Stinnett's
Day of Deceit
. Most of these books focus on a single question: Did FDR use the attack on Pearl Harbor as a “back door” to war? In other words, was FDR the mastermind behind a massive government conspiracy to push a reluctant nation into battle? Over the years, conservative critics of Roosevelt and a few historians have promoted the so-called backdoor theory, but it has failed to gain much credibility. All the evidence shows that FDR and the men around him were genuinely shocked when they learned of the attack. They may have been naive and gravely misjudged Japanese intentions and capability, but they were not guilty of deliberate deception.
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