Editor’s note:  If you take a little idolizing and some moderate preaching at the end, you will enjoy this well-researched work on one of America’s most interesting periods.  A few years back, I read about 1940 from Churchill’s/England’s perspective and found, as it is again with this book that the struggles between isolationists and interventionists between 1938 and 1941 was history changing.  Like our own lives, history never follows a straight line.   Henry Stimson, FDR’s Secretary of State is at the fulcrum of events as his diary informs Shinkle’s story.

Excerpt: (from Simpson’s diary) “The question was how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot, without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”