Newspaper Article

Exhibit shows FDR master editor on famous 'infamy' speech

OMICINSKI, JOHN

2001

Overview

Dictating to his secretary and sometimes-paramour, Grace Tully, at the White House on the evening of Dec. 7 as the scale of the disaster became more apparent with every snippet of incoming news, FDR started out his speech by calling it \"a date which will live in world history.\" As soon as Tully typed up the 500 words that would take him only six minutes to deliver, [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] took a pencil to it. No editor would have treated it as brutally. FDR literally chopped his first draft to pieces, transforming prosaic dictated verbiage into powerful, declarative lines that still resonate six decades later. Like a reporter on deadline, he updated the speech as word arrived that the Japanese also were attacking Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Midway Island. Banging the tocsin of war, he said, \"Our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.\"

• Publisher: USA Today, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, Inc
• Subject: Roosevelt, Franklin Delano / Tully, Grace