Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Read Free Page A

lithographs crowded the ivory walls, depicting life along the Hudson River, whose muddy banks formed the western boundary of Roosevelt’s native Hyde Park. A portrait of Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones—rescued from a second-hand shop for twenty-five dollars—kept watch over the president as he worked at his oak desk, crafted from timbers salvaged from the ill-fated Arctic explorer HMS Resolute , an 1880 gift from Queen Victoria to the then president Rutherford Hayes.
    With its commanding views of the White House’s south lawn and the Washington Monument in the distance, the oval study had become the center of Roosevelt’s presidency during his nine years in power. The wheelchair-bound leader, who had battled polio two decades earlier, often preferred the study’sconvenience to his more formal office downstairs in the executive wing. He not only conducted the nation’s business from the comfort of the study’s worn leather sofa and chairs—hand-me-downs from Theodore Roosevelt’s old presidential yacht Mayflower —but hosted a 7:15 p.m. cocktail hour for his senior aides, pouring bourbon old-fashioneds and martinis on a tray atop his desk, often flavoring them with a dash of absinthe. “He mixed the ingredients with the deliberation of an alchemist,” recalled his speechwriter Robert Sherwood, “but with what appeared to be a certain lack of precision since he carried on a steady conversation while doing it.”
    Roosevelt’s Sunday lunch capped a week made stressful by the deteriorating situation in the Pacific, so much so that the president decided to pass on a luncheon hosted by his wife, Eleanor, for thirty-one people, including his own cousin Frederick Adams. Instead, he chose to dine in his study at 1:15 p.m. with his longtime friend and trusted aide Harry Hopkins before he planned to settle in for a quiet afternoon of work on his treasured stamp collection. Despite the demands he faced as the nation’s commander in chief, Roosevelt carved out time each week to sort, clip, and affix stamps into more than one hundred hand-tooled leather albums. The collection would grow over his lifetime to number 1.2 million stamps, including ones from countries as far-flung as Haiti and Hong Kong and even a few of the last twenty-cent Confederate stamps believed ever sold at a postal station. Roosevelt’s boyhood hobby had over the years evolved into a form of occupational therapy, which the president needed now more than ever.
    Roosevelt had long struggled to prepare the American public and lawmakers for war, many of whom argued that the vast Atlantic and Pacific Oceans served as natural barriers against foreign aggressors. He focused much of his attention on Europe. Adolf Hitler’s Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939. Denmark and Norway soon fell, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Hitler unleashed his bombers on Great Britain in September 1940, in an eight-month assault known as the blitz that killed 43,000 and left another 1.4 million homeless. Roosevelt had watched the destruction with horror—and an eye toward the future. The broad expanse of the oceans, he warned, was not the same as in the days of clipper ships. America’s best hope to remain on the sidelines was to arm friendly nations now at war. “No mancan tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” he declared in a December 1940 fireside chat. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
    Much to the frustration of the president, who hoped to forestall a fight in the Pacific, Japan had continued on a collision course with the United States, triggered in part by unique social and geographical challenges. The island nation, whose population had tripled to seventy-three million in less than a century, was materially bankrupt, forced to import even its most basic food source—rice. The military only increased Japan’s dependence on foreign resources, from the bauxite needed to build fighters down to