December 07, 2001
IT WAS on an infamous Sunday morning 60 years ago today that, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, "the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."
The attack wasn't as sudden as the president suggested; historians know it grew out of long-simmering hostilities between Japan and the United States in the context of a brewing world war, and that Roosevelt's administration overlooked many warnings of an imminent attack. Still, the shock of that dawn raid transformed a nation that, chastened by the Great Depression and the dreadful carnage of World War I, had wanted little to do with the war engulfing Europe and East Asia.
Like the events of Sept. 11, the attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed the complacent assumption that, insulated by huge oceans, we could live in blissful isolation from the conflicts burdening the rest of the world.
Like almost any war, the four-year struggle against fascist aggression in the 1940s had its frightful paradoxes: We fought the so-called master race with a segregated military as we interned 120,000 completely innocent Japanese-Americans in prison camps and left the heaviest fighting to our totalitarian ally, the Soviet Union.
Yet the shared engagement in a heroic national cause brought Americans together as never before and, despite the horrors and privations of war, ennobled millions of lives. The contributions of Americans of all hues and ethnicities helped undermine racist and segregationist sentiments and paved the way for the struggle for civil rights.
And, 60 years after Pearl Harbor, the nations we fought in World War II are peaceful, prosperous, democratic allies. This country has apologized to many of the citizens whose rights it violated at home during the war.
We can only hope that 60 years after Sept. 11, 2001, we can say the same things about the aftermath of today's war on terrorism.
