A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (review)

Emily S. Rosenberg's A Date Which Will Live makes a valuable contribution to understanding how World War II is perceived in American cultural memory. The author, whose previous scholarly works consider the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century, is judicious in her survey of viewpoints on Pearl Harbor. She considers various important interpretations of the 7 December 1941 attack, both in the immediate context and over time. She correctly refuses to make sharp distinctions between scholarly and popular views, arguing that they interact rather than simply conflict.

A number of Rosenberg's themes are well known. For example, "infamy" occurs frequently in American thinking about Japan, alongside the theme of "revenge." Both the U.S. and Japan have indulged in recrimination about who was most responsible for, and behaved most badly in, the war. "Deceit," also called the "back door to war" theory, is a similarly well-documented strand in thought about the event.

Although there are those who see Pearl Harbor as a simple black-and-white event, good attacked by evil, Rosenberg points out that the event has been subject to diverse and complex interpretation. For example, Japanese Americans see it as the prelude to, and excuse for, the unjustifiable persecution of their community.

Some of the book's conclusions will provoke debate. For example, Rosenberg argues that the context of the Pearl Harbor attack, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reaction in his speech on the event, hark back directly to the frontier last stands of the Alamo and the Little Bighorn, and the subsequent desire for revenge. Certainly, these would be in the mix, but surely the larger myth in play is that of American "innocence," the oft-used theme of "What have we ever done to harm anyone?" Also, the most appropriate specific historical parallel was to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, an act widely attributed to Spanish perfidy, and which led to war. This in turn eventuated in a greater American presence in the Pacific and inevitable confrontation with Japan. Yet the Maine barely gets a mention in the book.

In the 1990s, Pearl Harbor, like the Enola Gay and the dropping of the atom bomb, became the subject of political clashes over meaning and interpretation. It is therefore surprising that, just before 9/11, many Americans, especially young adults, could not place Pearl Harbor in history. However, this perhaps explains why most people did not question the weak Pearl Harbor analogy, post 9/11 (9/11 was not an attack by one nation state on another, nor was it an assault by one national military against another). Rosenberg notes the minority who tried to criticize the analogy. But she fails to address a real Pearl Harbor lesson, related to the shift in U.S. foreign policy, post 2000, to the doctrine of the preemptive strike. Neither she nor most Americans appear to have registered that the most notorious preemptive strike in modern history occurred on 7 December 1941, and has never been quite forgiven by the victims.