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Pearl Harbor as Myth and Symbol

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In anticipation of today’s Oracular Presidential Intonations on the Subject of Pearl Harbor and its Relevance to the War on Islamofascists and Their Domestic Appeasers, I decided to take a look at some of the words uttered by previous American Presidents on the anniversary of the 1941 attack. Rather stupidly, it seems, I assumed that previous administrations would have dwelled predictably each December 7 on the Japanese attacks and the entry of the US into the charnel house of WWII. Turning to The American Presidency Project (which commenter jrd turned my nose toward a while back), I tallied up the references to “Pearl Harbor” within Presidential documents stretching back to the Roosevelt administration. It’s an unscientific survey, to be sure — it doesn’t distinguish between public addresses and written proclamations, and it doesn’t evaluate the content or context of the references — but the raw numbers are interesting:

FDR ———- 49
Truman ——- 40
Eisenhower —- 12
Kennedy ——- 4
Johnson ——- 21
Nixon ———- 2
Ford ———- 17
Carter ———- 6
Reagan ——– 48
Bush ———- 27
Clinton ——– 34
Bush ———- 62

In addition to realizing some odd trivial points — such as the fact that FDR’s “day of infamy” speech did not reference “Pearl Harbor” directly — I discovered that prior to Ronald Reagan’s administration, most US presidents just didn’t pay much attention to the anniversary. Truman, for instance, ever so briefly referred to the Pearl Harbor attacks in a written statement on 7 December 1952 (the 11th anniversary), but even when he spoke in Pearl Harbor in October 1950 he chose not to make any direct reference to the 1941 bombings. John Kennedy briefly mentioned the 20th anniversary in 1961, offering the eerie observation that most Americans remembered where they were on two dates — FDR’s death and the attacks on Pearl Harbor. LBJ issued written proclamation that commemorated the 25th anniversary, but it was Gerald Ford of all people who seems to have established the genre of the Pearl Harbor speech in 1975:

We who remember Pearl Harbor will always remember. For us it is a moment etched in time, a moment of shock and mixed feelings and, particularly, disbelief, a moment of shame and a moment of sorrow, of anguish and of anger, an end to irresolutions, a summons to action, the start of a total commitment that comes but rarely to men and to nations.

Whoever watched the Pacific churned by winds of war comes to this hallowed place with feelings overcoming words. Our shipmates who rest in honor here, our comrades in arms who sleep beneath the waves and on the islands that surround us need no eulogy beyond the eternal gratitude of the land that they loved.

Ford — a naval veteran of the Pacific theater — was surprisingly prolific in his references to Pearl Harbor, even though he served little more than two years in office. When Ford spoke of the 1941 attacks, he did so in the language of his own living historical memories of the war as well as within the context of the catastrophe in Vietnam, whose sorrowful aftermath the country was only just beginning to recognize; his thoughts on Pearl Harbor display an interesting tension between those two experiences. As historical documents, they attest to his own personal trauma — friends killed in battle or his own near-death in a typhoon — as well as to the national agony brought on by a recent war more pointless than most.

The champion of Pearl Harbor rhetoric, though, is none other than the man who spent the healthiest and most vulnerable years of his life defending the airspace of Texas from the predations of the North Vietnamese. More than any president before him, George W. Bush has sought to use our collective memories of the Pearl Harbor attacks to a vicariously sanctify his own stupid, jingoistic calls to national glory:

During 4 years of war, no one doubted the rightness of our cause; no one wavered in the quest of victory. As a result of the efforts and sacrifice of the veterans who are with us today and millions like them, the world was saved from tyranny.

Many of you in today’s Navy are the children and grandchildren of the generation that fought and won the Second World War. Now your calling has come. Each one of you is commissioned by history to face freedom’s enemies.

. . . We’re fighting to protect ourselves and our children from violence and fear. We’re fighting for the security of our people and the success of liberty. We’re fighting against men without conscience but full of ambition — to remake the world in their own brutal images. For all the reasons, we’re fighting to win. And win we will.

There is a great divide in our time, not between religions or cultures but between civilization and barbarism. People of all cultures wish to live in safety and dignity. The hope of justice and mercy and better lives are common to all humanity. Our enemies reject these values, and by doing so, they set themselves not against the West but against the entire world.

Our war against terror is not a war against one terrorist leader or one terrorist group. Terrorism is a movement, an ideology that respects no boundary of nationality or decency. The terrorists despise creative societies and individual choice, and thus they bear a special hatred for America. They desire to concentrate power in the hands of a few and to force every life into grim and joyless conformity. They celebrate death, making a mission of murder and a sacrament of suicide. Yet for some reason — for some reason — only young followers are ushered down this deadly path to paradise, while terrorist leaders run into caves to save their own hides.

We’ve seen their kind before. The terrorists are the heirs to fascism. They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased. They must be defeated. This struggle will not end in a truce or a treaty. It will end in victory for the United States, our friends, and for the cause of freedom.

It’s been five years since those words lumbered from George W. Bush’s mouth. It’s hard to recall a time when anyone took them seriously.

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