Chapter One

Franklin Roosevelt’s Sunday morning began as most of his Sundays began: with a cigarette and the Sunday papers in bed. He wasn’t a regular churchgoer, confining his attendance mainly to special occasions: weddings, funerals, his three inaugurations. In his youth and young adulthood he had often spent Sundays on the golf course, but his golfing days were long over, to his lasting regret. This Sunday morning–the first Sunday of December 1941–he read about himself in the papers. The New York Times gave him the top head, explaining how he had sent a personal appeal for peace to the Japanese emperor. Neither the Times nor the Washington Post, which provided similar coverage, included the substance of his appeal, as he had directed the State Department to release only the fact of his having approached the emperor. This way he got credit for his efforts on behalf of peace without having to acknowledge how hopeless those efforts were. The papers put the burden of warmongering on Japan; the government in Tokyo declared that its “patience” with the Western powers was at an end. Heavy movements of Japanese troops in occupied Indochina–movements about which Roosevelt had quietly released corroborating information–suggested an imminent thrust against Thailand or Malaya.

Sharing the headlines with the prospect of war in the Pacific was the reality of war in the Atlantic and Europe. The German offensive against the Soviet Union, begun the previous June, seemed to have stalled just short of Moscow. Temperatures of twenty below zero were punishing the German attackers, searing their flesh and freezing their crankcases. The German