Seventy-eight years ago today, on Dec. 8, 1941 — a date which will live in the annals of inspired editing — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress and uttered one of the most indelible phrases in all of American oratory.
A day earlier, Japan had launched a bloody surprise air raid on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Calling for a declaration of war, Roosevelt labeled Dec. 7, 1941, "a date which will live … in infamy."
In case you don't pore over the annals of inspired editing as avidly as we who toil with the hazardous raw material of words, I'm seizing this anniversary to share a few high points from what I like to call "revisionist history" — great moments in the revising of political rhetoric.
It's hard to conceive in our loudmouth, Twitter-dee and Twitter-dum era, but in the past American statesmen and polemicists labored to refine the precision and beauty of their language. Eloquence and clarity were once, for politicians, what an attention-getting TV persona is today — almost everything.
Here, in short, is one more measure of the miniaturization of public life in our time.
"Infamy," you see, did not come to Roosevelt immediately. At FDR's presidential library in upstate New York, you can examine the typescript of the first draft of his war message, which he dictated to a secretary the evening of Dec. 7. The first sentence pronounces that fateful Sunday "a date which will live in world history."
The words "world history" are crossed out with a pencil stroke, and above them is handwritten "infamy."
Roosevelt made the change himself, along with several trivial tweaks, later that evening, and may not have known right away what a difference it made. His original phrasing, after all, would have been accurate enough.