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It was a speech President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't expect to give. On a Sunday afternoon on December 7, 1941, our nation's 32nd president had just finished his lunch in his second-floor study in the White House and began working on his stamp collection when he was interrupted by a telephone call.
It was the secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, calling to inform him that the nation was under attack: The Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. In a long, ringing tone, the president shouted: "No!"
The surprise attack on one of America's most strategic naval bases shocked Roosevelt as well as the nation. It would turn out to be one of the worst military defeats in American history, killing 2,403 sailors, soldiers and civilians. The Japanese damaged or destroyed 19 Navy ships, including eight battleships, and more than 300 airplanes.
Though conspiracy theories abound as to whether Roosevelt knew about the attack ahead of time, countless investigations uncovered no evidence to justify such wild claims. If anything, Roosevelt's economic sanctions against the Japanese may have been a contributing factor to the attack, including the full embargo on exports to Japan and the freezing of Japanese assets in American banks.
The U.S. government had been negotiating with Japanese officials only a week or so before the attack. The infamous Hull note, named after Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was delivered to Japanese negotiators on November 26 and demanded that Japan withdraw from China and French Indochina. There was no further communication between the two nations until the Japanese delivered their unilateral and brutal reply to America on December 7.
That day was, by many accounts, the worst of Roosevelt's presidency. The state of world affairs at the time was grim: Hitler and the Nazis controlled most of mainland Europe, from France in the west to the perimeters of Moscow to the east. England and Russia, our future allies, were hanging on for dear life.
This was not Roosevelt's first brush with war: He was the undersecretary of the Navy during World War 1, and he knew that this was no time for America to wallow in pity or despair. He had work to do. He had a nation to rally.
Roosevelt's two speechwriters were in New York at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack and did not help him with the most important speech of his presidency. Others stepped in to fill the gap. "Some of his advisers, the secretary of state and secretary of war included, wanted him to deliver a much longer speech," Paul Sparrow, former director of the FDR Library said.
One speech drafted by the State Department weighed in at 17 pages and described the history of U.S.-Japanese affairs leading up to the attack. But Roosevelt had great instincts. He knew the speech had to be simple and short. "He knew that the American public wanted to hear that we had been wronged and that we will find a way to victory," Sparrow said.
This was a speech Roosevelt knew he had to write himself. Early that Sunday evening, he called in his secretary, Grace Tully, because he was ready to dictate a first draft. Unlike the State Department's speech, his was concise, clear and forceful. He knew that the speech was going to be heard not just by our elected leaders in Congress but by a national audience that was angry, afraid and in shock. The speech, Roosevelt understood, had to match the moment.
"He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, and began dictating in the same calm tone he used to deal with his mail," biographer Nathan Miller recalled, according to the National Archives. "He enunciated the words incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and new paragraph. Running little more than five hundred words, the message was dictated without hesitation or second thoughts."
Tully typed up what Roosevelt had dictated, and the president began editing, making just a few crucial changes by hand to the original draft. The most important was the substitution of one word in the first sentence, which changed the nature and character of the speech. "A date which will live in world history" was changed to "a date which will live in infamy," giving the speech its most famous phrase. And a powerful rebuke to the empire of Japan.
Roosevelt delivered the speech to a joint session of Congress in the early afternoon of December 8. Paralyzed by polio from the waist down, he insisted on walking to the podium and back. As he so often did in public, he supported his weight on a cane and his son's arm.
The speech was a mere 518 words and lasted just six and a half minutes. It was simulcast on radios across the nation—this was before television and cable—and an astounding 81 percent of Americans gathered around their consoles to hear the president's address. It was and still is the largest audience share for a broadcast in American history.
"No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory," Roosevelt said in closing. Thunderous applause followed, not only in the halls of Congress but in living rooms and kitchens across America.
Within an hour, Congress voted to declare war on the Empire of Japan. The vote was 82-0 in the Senate and 388-1 in the House. Montana Representative Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress and a lifelong pacifist, was the lone no vote.
When Germany and Italy declared war on the United States just a few days later, the United States quickly reciprocated. America was at war once again.
That one-word edit by Roosevelt—from history to infamy—may be one of the most famous of all time, comparable only to W.H. Auden's one-word edit that changed forever one of his most famous poems, "September 1, 1939," which he wrote after the Nazi invasion of Poland.
"We must love one another or die," Auden originally wrote. He was so troubled by the line that he changed it in his 1945 Collected Poems by substituting just one word: "We must love one another and die," read the change, one conjunction forever altering the meaning and beauty of the poem.
"It would take the New World, the United States, to come to the rescue of the Old," the late Winston Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert told an audience at Hillsdale College in 2006. "And emerge as the defenders of freedom."
Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech and his one-word edit helped launch a rescue mission the world cannot—and should not—ever forget. The New World would indeed rescue the Old, and that speech forever solidified Roosevelt's place as a great American wartime president.
