Day of Infamy

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If Pearl Harbor seemed an American disaster, it proved a Japanese disaster as well. Churchill knew that when he gloated at the news: "So we had won % after all!" So did Stimson, who felt "relief . . . that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people." So did Admiral Yamamoto, when he predicted that he would run wild for only a year. Pearl Harbor united Americans in rage and hatred, and thus united, powerful and determined, they would prove invincible.

FOOTNOTE: *In dictating to his secretary, Grace Tully, the short speech in which he would ask Congress to declare war against Japan, Roosevelt originally said, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history, the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked." Reviewing the typescript, Roosevelt crossed out "world history" with his pen and wrote "infamy."