| Eighty-one years ago today, an armada of Japanese aircraft launched a surprise bombardment of Pearl Harbor, killing twenty-four hundred Americans and insuring that the United States, until then a neutral power (at least officially), would enter the Second World War. Indelibly described as a “date which will live in infamy” by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the attack “might now be seen as a propaganda victory of incalculable value,” John Gregory Dunne wrote in The New Yorker, in 2001. As the sixtieth anniversary approached, Americans were marking the milestone with an array of books and special TV programming, as well as a “high-tech, high-hokum” Hollywood blockbuster by the director of “The Rock.” Most of those tributes, Dunne argued, obscured the more complicated history of Pearl Harbor. The popular American narrative—a tale of straightforward victimhood and heroism—overlooked the racial politics of the naval base, and of the mainland’s attitudes toward its Hawaiian surroundings. For those born after the attack—nowadays, that’s nearly everyone—the essay offers startling details and arguments, including the possibility that the Japanese made a strategic blunder by targeting warships and people, rather than a different resource nearby. Another generation onward, the anniversary has passed with little notice, which is all the more reason to revisit this piece. | 
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