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and Churchill, who always favored a tough stance toward the Japanese, deftly played the China card. “Of course, it is for you to handle this business and we certainly do not want an additional war,” he cabled Roosevelt. “But what about Chiang Kai-shek? Is he not having a very thin diet? If [China] collapses our joint dangers would enormously increase.”88 In the cabinet Stimson and Knox were prepared to play for time but despaired of leaving China in the lurch; Morgenthau was appalled at the prospect; Hull was already on record to that effect; and Ickes (for the umpteenth time) considered resigning. “If this negotiation with Japan had been consummated, I would have promptly resigned from the Cabinet with a ringing statement attacking the arrangement.… I believe the President would have lost the country on this issue and that hell would have been to pay generally.”89

When Roosevelt met with his war council (Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, and Stark) on November 25, 1941, it was agreed that little room for negotiation remained.90 The discussion focused on what to do should Japan reject a temporary truce. Aware that Tokyo had set a November 29 (Saturday) deadline, Roosevelt said, “We are likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday because the Japanese are notorious for attacking without warning. The question is how to maneuver them into firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves.”91 The president was not baiting a trap but, like Lincoln prior to Fort Sumter, wanted Japan to be perceived as the aggressor.* The consensus was that the Japanese would move from Indochina against Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, rather than the Philippines. It was not a question of whether the Japanese would attack, but where and when.92

Separated by more than sixty years and three generations from events in 1941, it is difficult to appreciate the implicit racial hostility toward Japan that characterized Roosevelt’s discussions with his advisers as war drew near. Sir Lewis Namier, the eminent British scholar, once observed that historians are inclined to remember the present and forget the past. Dimensions of tolerance are much greater now than they were then, and, given Japan’s current economic and industrial prowess, we can easily forget how little credibility Westerners assigned to the Japanese military in 1941. The army had been bogged down in China for four years; Zhukov had made quick work of the garrison in Manchukuo; and the Japanese Navy had not been engaged in battle on the high seas since 1905. “The Japs,” as FDR called them, might prevail in Southeast Asia, but they were scarcely seen as a threat to American forces in the Pacific, certainly not to Pearl Harbor, which both the Army and the Navy believed to be impregnable. This supercilious dismissal of Japan as a serious military rival allowed the war council to discuss the possibility of war in Southeast Asia with remarkable detachment. The conflict, if it came, they felt would be a distraction but little more.

Hull met Nomura and Kurusu in the late afternoon of Wednesday, November 26. Instead of presenting FDR’s plan for a modus vivendi, he gave the Japanese what they interpreted to be an ultimatum: a ten-point clarification of American demands for settlement in the Pacific that went far beyond anything broached previously. Not only was it nonresponsive to the Japanese truce offer, but the United States called for Japan’s complete withdrawal from China and Indochina, recognition of the Chungking government of Chiang Kai-shek, renunciation of further expansion in Southeast Asia, and withdrawal from the Tripartite Pact.93 It was a statement for the record rather than a serious attempt to reach agreement.94 “I have washed my hands of it,” Hull told Stimson afterward. “It is now in the hands of you and Knox—the Army and Navy.”95

The abrupt shift from modus vivendi to confrontation caught the military by surprise.96 On November 27, 1941, Admiral Stark alerted Kimmel in Hawaii and Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commanding the Asiatic Fleet, to be