Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [20]
The radio also was our portal into the world of professional sports. In the fall, that meant football. My father and I cheered on our favorite team, the Chicago Bears. The Bears were fighting it out one Sunday at Comiskey Park when the announcer on Chicago’s WENR radio station interrupted the action with a bulletin. “Flash: Airplanes from the empire of Japan have launched a surprise attack on the territories of Hawaii.” A U.S. military base called Pearl Harbor was in flames.
NBC Radio broke from its regular programming to air a live report from Honolulu: “We have witnessed this morning…the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done. This battle has been going on for nearly three hours…. It is no joke. It is a real war.”2 Hawaii was not yet an American state, but I had a vague idea of where it was. I didn’t know anything about Pearl Harbor or what it meant to the United States Navy. But I could feel that something terrible had happened. I saw it in my parents’ faces and heard it in the tense voices reporting the news of the attack. From that moment on, much of what was on the radio, in the newspapers, in talk on the streets, and in school centered on the attack.
For two years, Americans had followed the conflicts raging in Europe and Asia, but from the comfortable distance provided by two vast oceans. Many remembered the heavy American losses in World War I a little more than two decades earlier and wanted no part in another territorial dispute far away. That sentiment was especially strong in Chicago. The city was the national headquarters of the antiwar America First Committee. With more than eight hundred thousand members, it was one of the largest antiwar organizations in American history. The America Firsters appealed to many young Americans, including some whose paths I would cross in later life—a student at Yale Law School named Gerald Ford as well as a young John F. Kennedy, who sent the committee a check.* The America First Committee was one of the early casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack. Its membership dwindled almost overnight. And many of its supporters—Ford and Kennedy among them—soon went off to war.
Throughout the rest of that Sunday, our family huddled around the radio, listening to the latest news. New reports were coming in every hour:
President Roosevelt’s announcement of Japanese air attacks on United States Pacific bases staggered London, according to a dispatch just received, and London now awaits Prime Minister Churchill’s promise to declare war on Japan within the hour…. Political lines have been almost wiped out. Senator Wheeler of Montana, a leading isolationist says, “We must do the best we can to lick Japan.”…And the Chicago Tribune, one of the leading isolationist papers prints this headline for tomorrow morning: “OUR COUNTRY: RIGHT OR WRONG.”4
The next day, the American people heard from the President. Having first been elected four months after I was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only president I had known. There was something about Roosevelt’s voice that added to his authority. He had a formal, almost aristocratic tone. He certainly did not sound like any of our friends in the Midwest. Throughout the Great Depression, he had been a voice of reassurance, including to my parents. Outlining the indictment against the Japanese empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately. Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy…”5
The President asked Congress for a declaration