Presidential panic prevention
By Jim Coogan
It was early afternoon on Sunday December 7, 1941. President Franklin Roosevelt had just settled into a nap in the White House when an aide came into his room and woke him.
“Sir, an urgent message has just been received from Pacific Fleet Headquarters.” The man bent over the drowsy chief executive to make sure he was fully awake. “The cable says that there has been an attack on our naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was the Japanese that did it. There is apparently a lot of damage.”
President Roosevelt sat up and looked at the cable. “Get the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War over here immediately,” he said. He called his personal assistant to help him get dressed.
Less than a half hour later, the three men – Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Henry Stimson gathered in a conference room in the White House. No other members of the government were present. The atmosphere was tense when the president told his two cabinet members about the attack. “This is a really bad thing,” the president said. “It’s much worse than the Japanese attack on the gunboat Panay in China.” He gave the men the details that had come in the recent cable.
Stimson, as Secretary of War, immediately stood up and moved to leave the room. “Where are you going, Henry?” said the president.
I’ve got to put our armed forces on a war footing,” Stimson replied. “A lot of people will have to be notified about this.”
Roosevelt put his hand up. “Wait a minute, Henry. The last thing we want to do is to panic the American people. I think we can downplay what happened. It’s just a single attack. There’s no reason to think that the Japanese would follow up a thing like this. As we get into the new year, my gut feeling is that this is going to go away. The longer we can keep a lid on it the better.”
“But Mr. President,” Stimson replied. “This brings us into war!! The American people need to be told.”
Secretary of State Hull nodded in agreement. “We’re not ready for this, Mr. President. We’ve got to get the country fully mobilized for the struggle ahead. It’s imperative that we tell them.”
“Gentlemen,” said Roosevelt, looking up at both Hull and Stimson. “Do you know what going public about this will do to the stock market? Tomorrow, when Wall Street opens, there will be a sell-off like hasn’t been seen since 1929. We don’t want that to happen. Banks will close and business will come to a standstill. Unemployment will sky rocket. We have to keep this quiet.”
“With all due respect, Mr. President, People are going to find out about the attack. It can’t be downplayed or ignored. Shouldn’t Congress be notified?”
“When the press finds out about it and breaks the story, we’ll claim it’s just fake news,” the president responded. “Most people don’t know where Hawaii is anyway. They think it’s a foreign country.”
Reluctantly, Hull and Stimson sat back down. “So you are going to keep Pearl Harbor from the American People?” Hull asked.
“No need for them to know, boys,” said the president. “War’s a bad thing. Only the generals and admirals want war so they can keep the arms industry going for their friends. They are always looking for a fight. They don’t like me. I’ll call Emperor Hirohito this evening and I’m sure we can smooth things out. I promised the American people that I would keep us out of foreign wars. You remember my election slogan —‘Promises made, Promises Kept!!’ It’s not too early to start thinking about 1944.”
