A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory

"A Date Which Will Live" is both a stimulating and accessible history of how the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has been remembered and a sterling example of the employment of the theory of memory in history and postmodern analysis. The author, now a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, had fashioned a compelling narrative of how Americans have related to the experience of Pearl Harbor in the latter half of the twentieth century. She divides her narrative into two parts, the first dealing with the memory of the experience from December 7, 1941, until the end of the cold war. Her second part discusses the difficult battles over recollections of the World War II experience that took place in the 1990s, largely at the time of their fiftieth anniversaries. Twin themes inform this narrative. The first is one of "infamy," the immediate reaction to the attack in 1941--President Franklin D. Roosevelt used that terminology in announcing the attack to the American public--and it has been a critical component of the memory of the event ever since. This has been a dominant strain in the recollection, and both popular and scholarly accounts point to duplicity on the part of the Japanese to undertake a surprise attack, demolish the American Pacific fleet, and conquer the bulk of the Asian-Pacific region. Rosenberg does an outstanding job of tracing the charges and recriminations on both sides over who was responsible for the war, and who was rthe bad actor both in causing and in conducting it. A second theme is one of "deceit," not so much on the part of the Japanese although it is sometimes invoked there as well but on the part of FDR and other key strategists in the U.S. government who sought to maneuver the U.S. into a war with Hitler's Germany. This "back door to war" argument arose soon after the Pearl Harbor attack and has shown remarkable staying power. It suggests that FDR wanted to enter the war in Europe on the side of Great Britain but American isolationists prevented his doing so. He goaded the Japanese into an attack, and considerable circumstantial evidence has been assembled to argue that he even knew in advance that the attack was coming but chose not to warn the Pacific Fleet so that U.S. entry into the war would be assured. Despite overwhelming contrary evidence, and a preponderance of historical analysis debunking this conspiracy theory, it continues to have adherents, even arising in the 1990s as a congressional mandate for the Naval Historical Center to investigate the issue one more time. Rosenberg does an excellent job of telling this story, noting the point/counterpoint of the arguments, and offering sober judgment on the current state of the controversy. This aspect of the book is one of the most satisfying in the work as a whole. Rosenberg also traces the manner in which the attack has been depicted in a succession of important feature films that have influence popular ideas about Hearl Harbor. These incl