Pearl Harbor by Steven M. Gillon Page A

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.” 1
    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