Life During Wartime

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

When we remember President Franklin D. Roosevelt's leadership after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we tend to think of the famous response that he carefully dictated to his secretary, punctuation included: "Yesterday comma December 7th comma 1941 dash a date which will live in infamy..." Yet the President's leadership was most sorely tested not on the Sunday of the surprise attack or the Monday he delivered his address but in the long, difficult days that followed. Then as now, America's sense of territorial invulnerability had been shattered. Rumors swirled: the Japanese were planning to bomb Los Angeles, were already bombing San Francisco. There was real fear, not just among the public but also within the government, that Japan might invade the American mainland, whose defenses were weakened by the crippling of the Navy.

The differences between Pearl Harbor and last Tuesday's attack are abundant. At Pearl Harbor the Japanese targeted a military base; last week the terrorists targeted ordinary civilians traveling in the air, working in their offices, walking on the streets. Then, unlike today, we faced discrete, known enemies. But Pearl Harbor, and America's larger history, teaches us that at these crucial junctures, resolve and unity are powerful weapons against despair and hysteria.

After Pearl Harbor, symbolic acts were as significant as physical preparation for war. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt worked together to demonstrate that the war overseas would be won only by preserving American liberty at home. The week after the raid, the Secret Service suggested a list of security measures at the White House: camouflaging the building, placing machine guns on the roof, covering the skylights with sand and tin. Roosevelt rejected most of the suggestions, to show that the capital stood unbowed--much as, a century earlier, Abraham Lincoln insisted that the construction of the Capitol dome be completed in the midst of the Civil War. Similarly, on Tuesday President Bush decided to end the day in Washington rather than in a NORAD bunker. On Friday he presided over a national day of prayer, giving prominent roles to people of all races and creeds, including a Muslim religious leader.

Eleanor, visiting the West Coast after Pearl Harbor, bore witness to the hysteria directed against Japanese Americans. Government officials swooped down upon Japanese banks, stores and houses. Swimming against the tide of prejudice, Eleanor antagonized many Californians when she called for tolerance and posed for a picture with U.S.-born Japanese Americans; the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times reacted angrily and called for her forcible retirement from public life. The First Lady responded that more than fairness was at stake: "Almost the biggest obligation we have today is to prove that in a time of stress we can still live up to our beliefs." Though the U.S. later let that principle down with the internment camps, it remains a valuable point to remember, particularly if images of Palestinians celebrating the attacks inflame anger at Arab Americans here.

In many ways, the challenge facing George W. Bush is greater than Roosevelt's. F.D.R. was an immensely popular third-term President who had led America through the Great Depression. And he had the luxury of immediate, concrete action that galvanized Americans in the days and weeks after the attack. There were weapons to be built, resources to be conserved, a military force to assemble. This week, outside Washington and New York City, there was little more for most Americans to do than give blood.

But the crisis today makes such mundane acts heroic. Terrorism seeks to turn ordinary life into a battlefield, and the bravest act Americans can undertake in the coming weeks is to go about their daily lives, ride airplanes and elevators and do what the British did during the Blitz, show up at work every morning. Today Bush has the opportunity to draw on something we rarely experience: the feeling that America is not merely an abstraction but an entity of which we are each a vital part.

On Christmas Eve 1941, over the objections of the Secret Service, F.D.R. insisted on lighting the White House Christmas tree. It made a memorable night for the 15,000 people who gathered to hear him speak, illumined by a crescent moon, the red light of the Washington Monument and the glow of the tree. While we prepare to strike back against terrorism and secure our skies and our homes, the challenge to our leaders and to all of us is to show that no terrorist group will be allowed to extinguish the beacons of freedom and democracy.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of No Ordinary Time, about the Roosevelts and the home front during World War II