Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Read Online Free PDF

“the United States was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
    Tully jotted down each word, noting that the president’s voice was just as calm as when he dictated the mail, though he took care to pronounce each word and specify the precise punctuation and paragraph breaks. While the address lacked the “eloquent defiance” of Churchill’s and Hitler’s “hysterical bombast,” speechwriter Robert Sherwood later observed, it “represented Roosevelt at his simplest and most direct.”
    When the president finished his dictation, Tully typed a draft and returned it to Roosevelt to edit. Armed with a pencil, the president attacked the opening sentence, scratching out “world history” and writing above it “infamy,” the one word that his son James later noted “would forever describe what happened that day.” He likewise marked out “simultaneously” and substituted “suddenly.” The president made other tweaks as the speech went through two more drafts that evening and the next morning, including the insertion of news of Japan’s attacks elsewhere in the Pacific against Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake, and Midway. His trusted aide Hopkins would make the only other major addition to the six-and-a-half-minute speech, adding a sentence to the closing. “With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.”
    Reporters who had abandoned the Press Club bar and the afternoon Redskins game now flooded the downstairs press room, clamoring for information and littering the floor with cigarette butts. “No story at the White House ever brought out the crowd of reporters that Pearl Harbor did,” Merriman Smith, a reporter with United Press, later wrote. “There must have been one hundred reporters, radio men, newsreel and still photographers, assorted secretaries and Washington big shots trying to crowd into the press room where normally about a dozen men work.”
    At the same time the president dictated his speech, Press Secretary Steve Early stood up for another briefing with reporters. Early had met with the press and issued bulletins with the latest details on the attack throughout the afternoon, but America’s wartime reality meant new restrictions would now apply.
    “I want to ask you before you leave if there is any one of you reporting for Japanese agencies,” he said. “If there are, I am giving you no information and I have asked the Secret Service to take up the credentials of Japanese correspondents.”
    “Will they be put under arrest?” a reporter asked.
    “That is an activity of the Department of Justice.”
    People poured out of area movie houses—like the Metropolitan, where Errol Flynn starred in the western They Died with Their Boots On —and flocked toward the White House. Cars were backed up onPennsylvania Avenue. As many as one thousand bystanders, according to press estimates, crowded inside Lafayette Park just across the street, braving a frigid Potomac wind. The shouts of newsboys crying “Extra” were soon overcome by the masses singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “God Bless America.” “Folks wanted to be together,” a reporter for the Evening Star newspaper observed. “Strangers spoke to strangers. A sense of comradeship of all the people was apparent.”
    Vice President Henry Wallace and members of the cabinet filed into the oval study at 8:30 p.m., many of whom had caught afternoon flights to Washington. Maps dangled from easels, and extra chairs ringed the president’s desk. Secretary of State Hull sulked up front in a Chippendale armchair, his fingers together amid an air of gloom. Navy Secretary Knox and Press Secretary Early continued to rush in and out with more updates. Roosevelt sat behind his desk, where he had been most of the day, a cigarette perched between his lips, nodding at each member who entered.