FDR - Jean Edward Smith [356]
* Churchill embraced the term enthusiastically and, to the delight of his White House dinner companions on December 31, recited from memory Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:
Here, where the sword United Nations drew,
Our countrymen were warring on that day
And this is much—and all—which will not pass away.
The quotation is from Canto III, Verse xxxv. The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron 40 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905).
Churchill evidently knew Byron’s lengthy “Childe Harold” by heart and later recited it to his daughter Sarah on the eighty-five-mile drive from Saki airfield to Yalta in February 1945. Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry 78 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967).
* Roosevelt relied on the guesswork of Lord Beaverbrook, who cautioned against underestimating U.S. production capacity. Taking the projected Canadian production for 1942 as a base, Beaverbrook estimated that the excess of American resources over Canadian resources should permit the United States to produce fifteen times as much. According to Beaverbrook’s calculations, this would mean 45,000 tanks and 60,000 planes—figures that FDR relied on in drafting his speech. Memorandum, Lord Beaverbrook to the President, December 29, 1941, FDRL.
* The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are, citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” (emphasis added). In the leading case of Wong Kim Ark v. United States, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment meant exactly what it said and guaranteed American citizenship to all those born in the country regardless of their ethnic heritage or the status of their parents.
* The Roberts Commission was created by Executive Order on December 18, 1941. It was composed of Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts as chairman, plus two retired admirals, Joseph M. Reeves and William H. Standley (a former CNO), and two generals, Frank R. McCoy (ret.) and Joseph T. McNarney. The commission took testimony from 127 witnesses, including Admiral Kimmel and General Short. It reported to FDR on January 23, 1942, and the entire report was made public the next day. The principal finding was that Kimmel and Short were guilty of dereliction of duty. For the text of the Roberts Commission Report, see Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 39 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946).
† In his autobiography Warren confessed he had been wrong. “I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it. Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings I was conscience-stricken. It was wrong to act so impulsively … even though we had a good motive.” The Memoirs of Earl Warren 149 (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
* When Biddle asked for an outside opinion from a trio of New Deal stalwarts (Benjamin Cohen, Joseph L. Rauh, and Oscar Cox), which he hoped would buttress the case against removal, he got instead a seven-page brief that affirmed the constitutionality of removing citizens on a racial basis if necessary for national security. “It is a fact and not a legal theory that Japanese who are American citizens cannot readily be identified and distinguished from Japanese who owe no loyalty to the United States.” Cohen, Rauh, and Cox, “The Japanese Situation on the West Coast,” in Greg Robinson, By Order of the President 104 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
† In congressional testimony on February 4, 1942, General Clark and Admiral Stark told legislators that the Pacific