Dec. 7, 1941: Attack at Pearl Harbor a Bold, Desperate Gamble

I was reading the Mainichi newspaper site a while back and was surprised by an independent researcher there who admonished both governments for not having a research aim to gather the events that lead up to the attack on Dec. 7, 1941 (and shortly thereafter Germany's declaration of war on the US and ensuing "Battle of the Atlantic" sinking most commercial shipping, my Canadian grand-uncle, captain of the "City of Atlanta"). He, I presume, had discovered evidence that there was to be a "declaration of war" which, due to an unexpectedly long, long eulogy in a Washington, D.C., ceremony on an unusually warm December Sunday in 1941, led to the "missed opportunity" of the translation of a document (as I recall, by a woman) that would have been delivered as a "declaration of war" and since it wasn't, therefore, the "infamy" and the sole objection to "war" by Arkansas Senator, Hattie Ophelia Wyatt Caraway, too "gut reaction". Perhaps when a monument in NYC is finally put up to FDR (my Aunt Nellie's husband Mr. Donovan was once a law clerk in his firm once, and FDR arranged for Basil O'Connor to represent our family when my polio stricken uncle perished in an elevator accident in NYC's "Hall of Records" where my grandfather worked as a real estate reporter) and there is more research, we might find other sad "missed opportunities" for international intervention and treaty, that opportunity brought today by the United Nations formed after the terrible war.