Frothy Paradise

“People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping ‘I’m the decider’ may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio ‘fireside chat’ so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, ‘they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.’”

Pretty depressing to contemplate.