US Presidency
1943

Until recently very few people, even military experts, thought that the day would ever come when we might have to defend our Pacific Coast against Japanese threats of invasion. At the outbreak of the first World War relatively few people thought that our ships and shipping would be menaced by German submarines on the high seas or that the German militarists would ever attempt to dominate any nation outside of central Europe. After the Armistice in 1918, we thought and hoped that the militaristic philosophy of Germany had been crushed; and being full of the milk of human kindness we spent the next twenty ( fifteen ) years disarming, while the Germans whined so pathetically that the other nations permitted them and even helped them to rearm. For too many years we lived on pious hopes that aggressor and warlike nations would learn and understand and carry out the doctrine of purely voluntary peace. The well intentioned but ill-fated experiments of former years did not work. It is my hope that we will not try them again.