Which Date Should Live in Infamy?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/opinion/sunday/which-date-should-live-in-infamy.html

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Winston Churchill was ebullient; he thought it was all over at last. On the evening of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, hosting a small birthday dinner at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, for Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the American diplomat W. Averell Harriman, Churchill heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from the BBC. “At this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death,” he wrote in his war memoirs. “So we had won after all!” After standing alone against Berlin since the German invasion of Poland on the first day of September 1939, struggling to engage an isolationist America, Churchill “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

So the prevailing story of World War II goes even now, 75 years later. The attack on Pearl Harbor, an occasion of ceremonial remembrance commemorated once more last week, propelled the United States into the global contest against Japanese imperialism and European totalitarianism; within four years a once-isolationist America would achieve a superpower status from which it has yet to fall.

Yet the reality, as usual, is more complicated. The story of America’s entry into World War II three-quarters of a century ago offers us a window into the contingencies of history and the perennial risk that the nation’s isolationist tendencies — tendencies once more evident in our politics as the president-elect of the United States in 2016 revives the old slogan America First — can be durably potent even in moments of existential crisis.

In reaction to the bloodshed of World War I and to the cataclysm of the Great Depression — a global phenomenon — the United States spent the interwar years deeply skeptical of engagement overseas. Constricted by neutrality acts produced by isolationist sentiment and by the popular agitation of groups such as America First, Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to maneuver carefully as the Nazi threat grew in Europe. For 27 months, from the invasion of Poland through the Battle of Britain, the fall of France, the U-boat war in the Atlantic and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, America was the most reluctant of warriors.

With the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill, who had long — and largely unsuccessfully — wooed Roosevelt, believed he now had a full partner in the war against the Axis. “He was quite naturally in a high state of excitement,” noted Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. Churchill was eager to travel to Washington to lay plans for Allied strategy. Eden, however, “was not sure that the Americans would want him so soon.”

Eden was right. When Roosevelt dictated his speech declaring war on Japan to his secretary Grace Tully, it concerned only one nation: Japan. Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, wanted F.D.R. to move against Hitler, but the president’s political instincts told him to hold off. In a conversation with the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, Roosevelt was explicit about his concerns: “I seem to be conscious of a still lingering distinction in some quarters of the public between war with Japan and war with Germany.”

Isolationist opinion about the Pacific had evaporated in the heat of Pearl Harbor; it was less certain whether Americans were willing to engage fully in Europe as well. From its national headquarters in Chicago, America First was disbanding and released a statement supporting war against Japan, but, as the historian Wayne S. Cole has written, the isolationist group’s remarks were deliberately “phrased to leave the door open for possible continued opposition to participation in the European war.”

From afar, frustrated by the Eastern Front, Hitler solved Roosevelt’s problem by unilaterally declaring war on the United States on Thursday, Dec. 11.

Hitler’s motives remain mysterious. He was bound to join Japan under the Tripartite Pact only if Japan had been attacked, and treaties never meant that much to the Führer in any event. The best historical thinking is that Hitler believed he could win the war against American shipping in the Atlantic if he had a free hand, and he apparently decided that Japan’s bold stroke in the Pacific gave him the opening he needed to control the Atlantic.

And there was his grandiose vision of the destiny of National Socialism. “I understand only too well that a worldwide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my ideas,” Hitler said in his speech declaring war. “Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was the only child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry.” As for Germany, “It needs charity neither from Mr. Roosevelt nor from Mr. Churchill,” he said. “It wants only its rights! It will secure for itself this right to live even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it.”

Hitler had badly misjudged Roosevelt’s nation. “I don’t see much future for the Americans,” Hitler said in January 1942. “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together?”

What Hitler saw as America’s fatal weakness — our diversity — was of course the nation’s ultimate strength. That he had to force America’s hand by making his declaration of Dec. 11 before the United States could itself decide to make war on Nazi Germany is an uncomfortable reminder of the truth of an old observation attributed to the thankful Winston Churchill: One can always count on the Americans to do the right thing — after we’ve exhausted every other possibility.