Franklin D. Roosevelt: The People's President (Great Lives Series) (Great Lives (Fawcett)) - Softcover

9780449904015: Franklin D. Roosevelt: The People's President (Great Lives Series) (Great Lives (Fawcett))
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Witness history in the making as you turn the pages of time and discover the fascinating lives of famous explorers, leaders of twentieth-century politics and government, and great Americans.
 
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” With these resounding words and innovative, often controversial, programs Franklin D. Roosevelt stirred a nation to confront and triumph over the Great Depression of the 1930s, the gravest domestic crisis since the Civil War. Roosevelt then led the U.S. to victory over twin menaces from abroad—Nazi Germany and Japan—in World War II. It was a dazzling display of sustained, imaginative leadership that changed the presidency, and the country, forever.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: The People’s President depicts the life and times of one of America’s best-loved presidents. Roosevelt paid little heed to his personal adversity—the polio that crippled his legs. Listen to his radio addresses—the famed “fireside chats”—and see how he showed the American people just how much a president can do.

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1
Pearl Harbor
 
U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt hit the campaign trail in 1940 seeking reelection to a third term. That fall, in Cleveland, Ohio, he delivered a speech that many consider the most eloquent of his political career. Looking out at his audience and speaking in his usual, resonating tone, he asked for their support: “There is a storm raging now, a storm that makes things harder for the world. And that storm, which did not start in this land of ours, is the true reason that I would like to stick by these people of ours until we reach the clear, sure footing ahead.”
 
The “storm” that Roosevelt referred to was the warfare that was dividing the nations of Europe and causing chaos in Asia. During his second term, Roosevelt had succeeded in keeping America out of the affairs of warring countries abroad. However, by 1940, it was becoming increasingly clear to the President that the United States was destined to participate in the effort to combat the aggressive expansion of Germany and Japan. Though he hoped the United States would be able to remain neutral until the countries of the world reached that “clear, sure footing,” Roosevelt doubted that peace could be secured while the United States stood aloof. He felt confident that he was the person best qualified to lead the nation and the world on the road to peace—and through a period of war, if necessary. Roosevelt asked the American people to give him their “vote of confidence” and reelect him to a third term. They did.
 
Relations between the United States and Japan had been difficult since July of that year, when the U.S. Congress passed the Export Control Act. That piece of legislation enabled the President of the United States to prohibit the sale and export of war equipment to foreign powers. The United States was determined to stay out of other nations’ wars and claimed to be a neutral country. But the United States was in fact selling or leasing weapons and other tools of destruction to the participants in various armed conflicts around the globe, including Japan and Great Britain. When several governments questioned the supposed neutrality of a country so involved in the economics of war, Roosevelt and the legislators in the U.S. Congress saw the need to make U.S. trade policy consistent with U.S. foreign policy. First came the Export Control Act. Three months later, Roosevelt stopped the shipment of scrap metal to Japan, a move that country considered an extremely unfriendly act.
 
While the Germans strove to dominate Europe, Japan was aggressively pursuing its own policy of conquest and expansion in Asia and the South Pacific. It had already moved into China and northern Indochina, and was looking toward the Philippines. To emphasize its disapproval of such aggression, the United States put a further ban on all shipments of arms, petroleum products, machine tools, and raw materials to Japan. Great Britain and the Netherlands followed the United States by renouncing their own trade policies with Japan. Then, on September 27, 1940, Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact, which committed Germany and Italy to join Japan in any war against the United States.
 
Because Japan had relied on a steady stream of American weapons and raw materials to sustain its war machine, the U.S. government’s refusal to supply these materials left Japan in an uncertain situation. Consequently, in March 1941 serious negotiations began between Japan and the United States. Though the object of the negotiations was to avoid war between the two countries, Japan continued to pursue its expansionist policies in Southeast Asia. In July, Japanese troops moved into southern Indochina, thus moving closer to the Philippines and trade routes important to the United States. The United States considered Japan’s aggression against other countries and its threatening moves toward territory vital to U.S. interests inconsistent with any effort to negotiate terms of peace. In response, Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States, effectively stopping all U.S. trade with Japan. The President also warned Japan that the United States would defend countries whose interests coincided with those of the United States.
 
In November, Japan seemed intent on reaching an agreement with the United States when it sent a special Japanese envoy to Washington to participate in negotiations. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye informally proposed concessions to U.S. diplomats that Japan would be willing to make in exchange for restored trade with the United States and U.S. economic aid. Konoye seemed willing to ignore some of the provisions of the Tripartite Pact in exchange for an end to the U.S. trade embargo. Some U.S. officials were slightly encouraged. However, Japan continued its aggression in Asia. In China, it supported a puppet regime, or one that was merely a front for Japanese control. At the same time, Japanese troop movement indicated a possible invasion of Singapore.
 
Roosevelt and his advisers did not trust Japan. They were also skeptical as a result of their dealings with Japan’s Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Matsuoka had a great deal of influence in the development of his country’s foreign policy and had been very outspoken in his belief that it was in Japan’s best interest to adhere to the Tripartite Pact. Through Japan’s Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, Japan offered to withdraw its troops from China and to return nearly all the Chinese territory it had conquered back to the Chinese. In exchange, Japan wanted the United States to end its economic aid to China, restore normal trade relations with Japan, and provide Japan with a loan, the amount of which was to be agreed on later. Though certainly not a leap toward peace, the Japanese proposal at least seemed to indicate a possible willingness to compromise for the sake of avoiding a war with the United States.
 
Months of talks ensued, but they were hampered by suspicions, language difficulties, and cultural differences, as well as by generally conflicting interests. Meanwhile, it became increasingly apparent that U.S. involvement in the war in Europe was inevitable. Germany, which had been steadily pursuing its own policy of expansion in Europe, had conquered several of its neighboring countries and was seeking to expand further. Outraged by Germany’s brutal quest for world domination, the United States, on President Roosevelt’s orders, began to strengthen its defenses and prepared for war. More proposals came from Japan, including a promise to end its expansionist policy and to withdraw its troops from Indochina. However, the Japanese demanded that in exchange the United States accept Japan’s presence in China and other conditions the U.S. government considered unacceptable.
 
The talks stalled, and tensions between the two countries mounted. Nomura said to Roosevelt, “Your recent proposals will no doubt be the cause of painful disappointment to the Japanese government.” Roosevelt replied, “To tell the truth, I too am very disappointed that the situation has developed in the manner that it has.”
 
After what seemed like an endless series of offers and counteroffers, the United States offered Japan a policy declaration of its position on Asian affairs. The statement emphasized territorial integrity, equal commercial opportunities, and future security for all Asian nations. The Japanese were insulted and furious that the United States would dare to issue such a sermonlike declaration. Japan had already taken precautionary measures to prepare for war against the United States. Now, as relations between the two countries deteriorated beyond any possibility of reconciliation, Japan began to plan a first strike on the United States.
 
Roosevelt left Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, for Warm Springs, Georgia, where he often took vacations and spent time at a health spa. Only four days later he was called back as the Japanese threat to attack the United States became more imminent.
 
Roosevelt was kept abreast of developments virtually by the hour. Throughout its negotiations with Japan, the United States had listened to Japanese radio communications, deciphering complex codes so that Roosevelt, in his dealings with Japan, would know precisely what was behind that government’s peace proposals. Now, potentially on the brink of war, the United States listened even more closely, hoping to intercept any information that might serve as a warning of an impending Japanese attack.
 
Roosevelt had been informed by his advisers that intelligence reports and intercepted Japanese radio messages seemed to indicate that Japan was planning to invade Thailand. Such an invasion would expand Japan’s growing empire and would give Japan an additional strategic outpost. It would also damage the United States, which imported much of its tin and rubber from Thailand. Roosevelt and his advisers considered the question of whether, in the event of an attack on Thailand, the United States should intervene.
 
On December 3, 1941, Japanese officials in the United States, on the orders of their government, returned to Tokyo. On December 5, Roosevelt was told at a cabinet meeting that radio information regarding the movement of Japanese ships indicated that Japan was planning an attack on the United States or its territories and that any such attack would likely come from the south. (Additional messages were intercepted on December 6—messages that would have revealed Japan’s intention of bombing Hawaii—but these messages, because of their low priority classification, were not deciphered and translated in time to serve as a warning to the United States.)
 
President Roosevelt sent a personal letter to Emperor Hirohito of Japan requesting that he dispel the rumor that Japan was planning an attack on the United States. However, by the time Hirohito received the letter, it was too late to dispel any rumors.
 
Before dawn on the clear, calm Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, 189 Japanese fighter planes took off from aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean and made their way through the early morning darkness bound for Hawaii. U.S. military personnel stationed at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor naval base were either sleeping or performing their routine morning duties. Eight large American battleships were neatly moored in the harbor. Other vessels in the harbor or in dry dock included forty-one U.S. destroyers, eight cruiser ships, five submarines, and other smaller boats. One Navy officer later remembered looking up, before teeing off at a nearby golf course, and seeing the Japanese planes in the distance.
 
Just before eight o’clock that morning, the roar of sky bombers shattered the morning calm as every important military installation on the Hawaiian island of Oahu came under Japanese attack. Less than an hour later, another wave of Japanese fighter planes arrived to deal a second blow to the already devastated U.S. fleet. A third wave arrived, but the job was already complete.
 
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who was eating lunch at the time, received a telephone call from President Roosevelt. “They’ve attacked Hawaii! They’re now bombing Hawaii!” the President shouted into the receiver. Stimson’s reaction was one of both shock and relief: He never really believed that Japan would strike first, but now that it had, the United States no longer faced the decision of whether or not to enter the war.
 
The attack on Pearl Harbor took a tremendous toll in American lives and military equipment. Nineteen U.S. warships were destroyed, as were fifty-two U.S. fighter planes. More than 2,000 American sailors were killed, and 237 Army personnel lost their lives. Japan lost twenty-nine aircraft and six submarines, but, having caught America unprepared, it had, for the time being, wiped out the U.S. strategic presence in the Pacific in slightly less than two hours.
 
President Roosevelt was visibly shaken when he met with his cabinet at eight-thirty that night. Not only had the United States been attacked, but the U.S. Navy, a branch of the armed forces in which Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, had a great deal of pride, had been caught entirely unawares. The attack had resulted in the worst naval disaster in U.S. history. Roosevelt had a difficult time accepting the fact that the Navy had allowed itself to be so vulnerable to an air raid.
 
On Monday, December 8, President Roosevelt spoke to the American people from the rostrum of the House of Representatives. Looking out into the crowded chamber, he began, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He asked Congress to declare “that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan ... a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”
 
The request made Roosevelt the second U.S. President in the twentieth century to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Thirty minutes later, Congress declared war on Japan. Within a week, Japan’s European allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States. The U.S. entrance into World War II was complete. The “storm” that Roosevelt had spoken of in 1940 was raging more furiously than ever, and the “clear, sure footing” that the President so wanted for his country was going to be a long time in coming.

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  • PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
  • Publication date1990
  • ISBN 10 0449904016
  • ISBN 13 9780449904015
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages128

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