IN THE HISTORY of the 20th century, there is probably no one single event where the day before and the day after were quite as different from one another as those that preceded and followed Dec. 7, 1941.
On that Sunday 63 years ago, a world that had seemed so comfortable and safe abruptly ended and was replaced by a new and much more dangerous era.
The day before Pearl Harbor, at least for most Americans, was quiet. It was a Saturday and with the economy reviving after more than a decade of depression, people were shopping, listening to college football, and generally going about their lives.
Sure, there was still a war raging in Europe, but even then, with the draft, and a massive investment in arms, as well as Lend-Lease, many Americans still doubted that the United States would ever become actively involved.
In fact, just the week before, a resolution in the House or Representatives to continue the draft--which had begun the year before as an emergency measure--passed that chamber by just a single vote.
America as a whole remained decidedly isolationist. The America First Movement--an organization committed to keeping America neutral and out of a war in Europe--was going strong. It had 450 chapters and about 300,000 members. They even had a big national rally planned in New York City for later in December.
Militarily, the United States was still woefully unprepared for war. Even with a draft, our army was small, and with so much ordnance going overseas to help the British and the Russians, it was decidedly underequipped.
New aircraft and ships were all on order, but thanks to a creaky military procurement system, they were still a long way from being deployed. In fact, Virginia's Sen. Harry Byrd was repeatedly asking the Roosevelt administration why the 50,000 new aircraft that the president had promised in his 1940 State of the Union message were still on order.
In 1940, President Roosevelt had moved the Pacific Fleet from its longtime base in San Diego to Pearl Harbor. He saw the Japanese as a threat, as did the Navy, but no one really thought them capable of a long-range attack on such a powerful U.S. stronghold.
If they did attack, or so went the prevailing wisdom, then the assault, when it came, would either be on the Philippines or perhaps on the British colony of Singapore.
In many ways, the day before Pearl Harbor, for most Americans, was relatively secure and comfortable. It was one where the United States, protected by thousands of miles of ocean, could watch its enemies at a distance, ignore them or engage them at its choice, and comfortably chart its own course.
That however, changed in an instant. The Japanese saw our complacency as an opportunity, and with a fiendish efficiency broke open the myth of isolationism and forever changed our view of the world and our own security.
Suddenly we realized that we didn't know our enemies particularly well, they were stronger than we thought, and at least in the short term, we were ill-equipped to deal with them.
The days after Pearl Harbor, once the shock wore off, were a period or radical readjustment. America had never been attacked like this before. The Japanese had assaulted U.S. territory and had sunk nearly a dozen U.S. capital ships.
Isolationism and neutrality, by necessity, were instantly abandoned. The America First movement canceled its rallies and closed up shop. Probably no other organization in our history has gone out of business quite this quickly.
Naturally, official Washington hunted around for someone to blame, but at the end of the day, there were plenty of intelligence failures and shortcomings to go around.
Just like the post 9/11 investigations, the basic conclusion was that we had underestimated our potential enemies and missed a lot of signals that might have indicated their intentions. However, to a nation now engaged in a major conflict, one that was life or death, there just wasn't much time to point fingers.
Overnight, men who had shown little interest in the military--and my father and uncle were good examples--went from being drafting clerks, construction workers, and students, to being soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. They began to learn the names of places they had never heard of before: Burma, Kwajalein, Oran, and Salerno to name a few. Their slang, once just kid stuff, now included a host of war words and military jargon, including "ack ack," "repo-depot," "jar head," "88s," "zeros," "flat tops," and "R&R."
And, of course, a lot of families, some 292,000 before war's end, would get the infamous telegram from the War Department telling them a son or husband was killed in action. More than a few homes across the country would have a "gold star" in the window indicating a loved one had died in the service of their country.
Overall, the world outlook of the United States changed, too. There was a commitment, as the war was coming to an end, to a much more active engagement in the world. If we were to avoid a conflict overseas, and avoid another Pearl Harbor, so went the wisdom, then we had to be actively involved in what had just a few years before been places too far from home to be bothered with.
And militarily, the lesson of Pearl Harbor, not to be caught by surprise, would serve as the watchword during the Cold War. Ronald Reagan, more than 40 years after the attack, would invoke the memory of Pearl Harbor when he talked about his Strategic Defense Initiative.
There have been other days that seemingly changed the course of our history, but rarely has one day, and one attack, so radically altered the course of a generation, a nation, and an entire society.
DAVID KERR of Stafford County is a congressional aide.