Word: pearling
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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...
...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...
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...
Many of the panelists did not see so much the comparison to Pearl Harbor as the internment of Japanese-Americans. They worry that a war with countries in the Middle East may prompt the scaling back of individual liberties specifically for Americans of Islamic faith or with darker skin. I hope that the United States learns from its mistakes with the Japanese-Americans, and that were able to overcomethe misunderstanding of other cultures, says Rita...