ABSTRACT
Among the credentials of Joseph Grew, long-term US ambassador to Japan, was that of being married to the granddaughter of Commodore Perry. As a young man, Grew was befriended by Theodore Roosevelt, then graduated with Franklin Roosevelt in the Groton class of 1900, later joining him on the Harvard Crimson. On 14 December 1940 Grew told FDR that his various efforts in Tokyo to foster moderation had come to naught and that Japan should thus be considered a predator nation with which the US was “bound to have a showdown someday.” While Roosevelt’s reaction was characteristically murky, one thing was clear: he did not want the US to be the one unvanquished democracy left in the world and thus – despite all the votegetting rhetoric about non-intervention – he was not going to let Britain fall. Even before the 1940 election, he initiated on 16 September the nation’s first peacetime draft, calling for a uniformed force of 1.2 million and 800,000 reservists.1 With the election safely behind him, he could embark on an unprecedented third term with the powers invested in him by the LendLease Act of 11 March 1941, in effect ending the isolationists’ neutrality laws of the 1930s by authorizing aid to any nation “whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States,” without asking Congress for a declaration of war it was not yet likely to give.2
