LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Pearl Harbor
built 620 days ago
[I]t is easy to second-guess and to exaggerate Roosevelt's failings as a military leader. The president neither invited nor welcomed the Pearl Harbor attack, which was a brilliantly planned maneuver by Japan. He worked with Darlan in the hope of preventing unnecessary loss of Allied lives. Unconditional surrender, given American anger at the enemy, was a politically logical policy. It ... proved reassuring to the Soviet Union, which had feared a separate German-American peace. Establishing the second front required control of the air and large supplies of landing craft, and these were not assured until 1944.
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Roosevelt's program to bring maximum aid to Britain and, after June 1941, to Russia was opposed, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor restored national unity. During the war, Roosevelt shelved the New Deal in the interests of conciliating the business community, both in order to get full production during the war and to prepare the way for a united acceptance of the peace settlements after the war. A series of conferences with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin laid down the bases for the postwar world. In 1944 he was elected to a fourth term, running against Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York.
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At a farcical "sedition trial" that ended in a mistrial, Roosevelt's Justice Department accused some 30-odd isolationists, mostly small-time operators and individual cranks, of engaging in an ideological "conspiracy" against the United States. Directly collaborating with the Feds was a battalion of far-left private investigators and anti-"subversive" outfits with names like the "Friends of Democracy," who specialized in smearing the president's enemies, zeroing in on the activities of the America First Committee, which was effectively mobilizing the vast majority of Americans who opposed intervention in the European war right up until Pearl Harbor. They were, in short, the David Horowitzes of the 1930s, who were called left-wingers back then, and these days are considered to be on the "Right."
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Historians ... debate Roosevelt's policies toward Japan, whose leaders were bent on expansion in the 1930s. Hoping to contain this expansion, the president gradually tightened an embargo of vital goods to Japan. He also demanded that Japan halt its aggressive activities in China and Indochina. Instead of backing down, the militarists who controlled Japan decided to fight, by attacking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, and by assaulting the East Indies. These moves left no doubt about Japan's aggressive intentions. In asking for a declaration of war, the president called December 7 "a date which will live in infamy."
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